It is false to claim that no one knows when life begins and dishonest to argue that abortion does not kill a human being.
Abort73.com has a great page on the question of when life really begins. Be sure to read it (I added the link to my blogroll for handy reference). The link has a long list of embryology textbooks with quotes on the topic, plus quotes from other leaders. To hold any other view is to be anti-science.
Check out the short video at that site. It speaks volumes.
Here’s a special quote:
Faye Wattleton, the longest reigning president of the largest abortion provider in the world – Planned Parenthood – argued as far back as 1997 that everyone already knows that abortion kills. She proclaims the following in an interview with Ms. Magazine:
“I think we have deluded ourselves into believing that people don’t know that abortion is killing. So any pretense that abortion is not killing is a signal of our ambivalence, a signal that we cannot say yes, it kills a fetus.”
Also see Time Magazine -Wanted: Someone to play God
So credit two scrupulous professors for making the case that skittish politicians won’t. In their new book, Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, Princeton’s Robert George and the University of South Carolina’s Christopher Tollefsen argue for treating the embryo as inviolable. Their defense, less theological than biological, is that the embryo is a whole, living member of the human species in its earliest stage of development, not just a potential one or a part of one–and if destroyed, that particular individual has perished. From that conviction arise their rules for both research and reproduction: Don’t create more embryos than you will implant. No freezing, no choosing, no storing for future use and no experimenting on them.
So why is abortion still legal? The Roe v. Wade decision claimed that we didn’t know when life begins. The justices didn’t explain why we wouldn’t err on the side of life, even if we really didn’t know when it began. But now that we do know, consider this quote:
If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant’s [abortion] case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life is then guaranteed specifically by the [14th] Amendment.
United States Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, Roe v. Wade
Filed under: Christian worldview, Favorites, Politics, Pro-life | Tagged: abortion, atheism, atheists, pro-choice, Pro-life, religion
This is what I’ve been saying all along, from A to Z. There is absolutely no way it can be truthfully said that it isn’t a human life that is being destroyed. Some are skittish to say or hear it, but in the majority of cases, it amounts to murder, plain and simple. And no, it is absolutely NOTHING like capital punishment. Such a comparison is lame and dishonest.
Because convicted criminals aren’t really persons?
thanks for this post – it was very good to read this! after several conversations i’ve had with people who say that we don’t know when life begins or when life is viable, it’s encouraging to see that scientists know and most agree. and isn’t that what most unbelievers want instead – scientific evidence and proof?
Hi Kimita – good points – yes, they say they want scientific evidence and proof. Oddly, I see most of them as still being pro-legalized abortion.
Hi me – of course convicted criminals are persons. I just visited about 70 of them this weekend. It is just that some criminals murdered other human beings and were found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and their punishment was the death penalty. Is it fair to assume that you are anti-capital punishment and anti-legalized abortion?
Has anyone noticed recently how the entertainment biz says that pregnant celebrities have or are displaying a “bump?”
I think many acknowledge that there’s a human life there, but it amounts to little more than a “bump” or a blob of stuff in their eyes- and we’re free to do whatever we want with that thing until it’s actually released from the womb.
Excellent post. I will have to go check out that site. Thanks for the link Neil.
Hey, Neil, I can’t believe you missed the opportunity to quote me! :p
Crime of a person about to be executed: torturing and murdering several humans.
Crime of foetus: being conceived to a mother and/or father who doesn’t particularly want it.
I must say, it’s a nice and tidy perspective. Have you thought through the implications?
http://timthefoolman.com/2006/03/15/life-begins-at-conception/
Implications? Uh, yeah . . . we shouldn’t permit abortions unless the life of the mother is at stake.
Ahem… the implication of “life begins at conception,” which I think is the title of the blog, and not the implication of abortion.
“Life begins at conception” is a great sound bite, and it sounds like great legislation as long as you don’t know anybody who’s miscarried. My family has been in that boat, several times.
I also have family members in the medical field that are familiar with many ways to induce an intentional miscarriage with a high degree of confidence. But unless you’ve watched family members go through miscarriages, and considered the implications of it’s all nice and tidy, isn’t it?
If you read the link, you’d know that I am pro-life. At the same time, I’ve considered the implications of life begins at conception, which goes far beyond making abortion illegal (we can bust them on in utero child abuse for smoking, drinking, taking drugs, or maybe just not eating right), and I’m not willing to go down that legal path. Are you? – Tim
Hi Tim,
Thanks for the clarification. I wasn’t sure where you were headed so I guessed.
“Life begins at conception” is more than a great sound bite, it is a scientific fact.
My condolences on the miscarriages in your family. My wife had a total of five before/after our two kids were born, so I can attest to the pain they cause. I don’t see how that changes anything with my argument, though. My pro-life stance is still nice and tidy: Life begins at conception, and we ought not crush and dismember that life.
I am glad to see that you are pro-life! But I don’t follow your slippery slope argument. (Actually, I think some states already have laws about such things – crack perhaps?) But laws saying you can’t abort wouldn’t necessarily lead to banning smoking, drinking, Cheetos, etc. I’m glad to go down the path of making abortions illegal. It will save lives and change behaviors in a hurry.
If the law says “life begins at conception,” and you’re going to stop murder of the fetus, then why would you stop short of protecting it from other, non-deadly harm? If we’re truly concerned about that life, why wouldn’t we extend that same protection to the child a few months earlier that we provide after birth?
We protect children from abusive parents. We don’t wait until they kill the child to step in and say “enough.” If we were to overturn Roe v. Wade on the basis of LB@C, then we would be hypocritical to not make sure that we protected the child.
But even if we assume that crack moms and smokers are off-the-hook for the abuse of the fetus, how would we know that event A was a miscarriage, and event B was an abortion? This would be particularly true given the reality that women will continue to have abortions if it’s illegal. Do we say, “Well, the Jones family was trying to get pregnant, so obviously, that’s a miscarriage… but Miss Thompson is a single Mom, so clearly, that’s an abortion”?
How would we prosecute abortions under such a rule without bringing in countless innocent families, and doing so at one of the most emotionally painful times of their lives? – Tim
Neil, may I address this one?
Tim,
Under that rubric, we shouldn’t even ban third-trimester abortions, because women miscarry, even at that late stage. The former president of the National Abortion Federation admitted openly to performing voluntary (i.e. non-therapeutic) abortions on women who were 32 weeks along in their gestational age. Another abortionist said that 80% of the late-term abortions he had performed were done on healthy women with healthy babies. So… since women are going to get late-term abortions anyway, we should make it legal to kill your viable child? In fact, given that there is Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, we ought to make it legal to commit infanticide, as we don’t want grief-stricken families to be torn apart by a murder investigation, right?
Legislation that states that life begins at conception (or is protected at conception) is aimed at making abortion akin to every other homicide. There are degrees of homicide – deliberate, in the heat of passion, reckless, and negligent. Deliberate abortion – via mechanical, chemical, or pharmacological means – would be illegal. That is deliberate homicide and will be treated as such. Negligent homicide is often not prosecuted, and frankly, the only people who would do so are the pro-choicers, attempting to drum up support for their side by victimising and terrorising women.
Most every pro-life statute refuses to charge the woman. You’ve provided one of the most sound justifications for that distinction: unless there is an independent perpetrator (or the possession of a then-illegal or misbranded drug, specifically, an abortifacient), then there is no crime to prosecute.
Don’t forget that the Fourth Amendment still applies. You need a reasonable belief that a crime – not a happenstance of nature or an accident – occurred, and that the person whom you are investigating committed the crime or has knowledge of it. So unless you can demonstrate not just that the woman miscarried, but miscarried in such a way as to indicate that she just had an induced abortion, it would be unconstitutional to pursue the investigation.
Consider that people die in their sleep all the time, or have heart attacks at home, and you don’t run around investigating the family members to determine whether or not there was a murder. No one says, “Well, it ought to be legal to kill your spouse, so you don’t have the police up in your grill when he has a heart attack in his sleep.” So I think that a lot of your fears are completely unfounded – we KNOW, for a fact, how anti-homicide statutes are enforced. There’s no reason whatsoever to believe that laws against infanticide would be prosecuted in a way that is radically different and more kind than those against foeticide.
In short, under a pro-life legal system, a woman who miscarried would not be investigated because it’s unconstitutional (without evidence of a crime that goes beyond the normal circumstances), inconsistent with every other method of investigation of crime, there would not be a perpetrator (i.e. abortionist), and the only people who would want this are those trying to get pro-life laws repealed.
Theobromophile,
I’ll make this my last comment (and let either of you have the “last word,” but I think what you’ve described is an untenable position, given that prior to Roe v. Wade, most abortions were performed in secret, or were self-induced.
In the cases you described, how often is the body disposed of with nobody outside the family examining it, or knowing of its existence? Do you personally bury the infant that dies, or the spouse? Yes, a post-miscarriage D&C would typically be in order for a miscarriage, but if a woman is willing to deal with the physical and emotional risks, she might avoid that.
Even with a D&C, a doctor would be at less risk to perform this procedure in secret than to perform the abortion themselves. Given that we know abortions happened in secret prior to Roe v. Wade, it’s not hard to imagine this happening on a large scale.
There are clear and established mechanisms in place to determine whether or not suspicious circumstances existed when someone dies after they’re born. Not so with the unborn child (we would have to create them), and so my position stands. – Tim
“In short, under a pro-life legal system, a woman who miscarried would not be investigated”
Theobromophile said it better than I will, but here’s my response:
Is that what happened pre-Roe v Wade? No.
Just because it can be challenging to determine guilt for murderers, rapists, etc. of those outside the womb doesn’t mean we make those crimes legal. You are creating fictional scenarios that seem to pose some dilemmas but if abortion kills an innocent human being – and it clearly does – then we should outlaw that.
I’m not saying that you are in this category, but some unclear-thinking pro-lifers claim that it isn’t fair that rich people will have better access to abortions if they became illegal, as if ensuring that poor people can murder their children cheaply is some kind of Constitutional right.
You are free to self-identify as pro-life, of course, but I must say I find your views to be a bit confusing – e.g., “I’m pro-life because the unborn are innocent human beings, but I think there should be absolutely no restrictions against crushing and dismembering those innocent human beings.”