The Case Against Abortion: Medical Testimony
2008 March 6
Abort73 recently posted this video to YouTube.
…who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.
Romans 1:18
—————-
Now playing: Battles – Race: In
via FoxyTunes
One Response
leave one →
Ugh. I have to be honest Jim, it seems that most of what I’ve seen of this site has little to do with exploring the questions of abortion and more to do with convincing others of a ‘truth’ the author already believes to be known and absolute. This whole video focuses on using the biological definition of life in order to dodge the real question, when does ‘ensoulment’ occur?
I found this penance attributed to the English Monk Bede to provide an interesting perspective on how much of the Church perceived abortion in the past, “A mother who kills her child before the fortieth day shall do penance for one year. If it is after the child has become alive, [she shall do penance] as a murderess. But it makes a great difference whether a poor woman does it on account of the difficulty of supporting [the child] or a harlot for the sake of concealing her wickedness.”
Of course biological knowledge at the time was incredibly limited, but you still can’t help but be struck by the difference between this nuanced view of the issue and the absolutist insistence that all abortion at any time after conception is murder. These ancient Christians seem like liberal humanists compared to modern fundamentalists.
Now this video, and I assume you yourself, claim that modern science has given us a single glorious moment to point at and say “there, that is a living human being with all the rights of such.” The moment of conception. But modern science and embryonic research has blurred even that seemingly clear line; the evolutionary biologist Steven Pinker explains,
“Just as a microscope reveals that a straight edge is really ragged, research on human reproduction shows that the ‘moment of conception’ is not a moment at all. Sometimes several sperm penetrate the outer membrane of the egg, and it takes time for the egg to eject the extra chromosomes…Even when a single sperm enters, its genes remain separate from those of the egg for a day or more, and it takes yet another day or so for the newly merged genome to control the cell. So the ‘moment’ of conception is in fact a span of twenty-four to forty-eight hours.”
The fact is conception and birth, like all biological life, is an ever continuing process. There exists no clear concise line.
I think it’s also important to point out that between 30 and 50 percent (these numbers vary mostly because of the minuteness of the phenomenon being measured) of zygotes never make it, being spontaneously aborted before the woman even knows she’s pregnant. If life truly begins at conception we ought to stop telling people we come from a family of three siblings, for our mother’s womb is a biological graveyard of unfathomable loss, full of siblings we never got to know. And of course I have to wonder why so much time and money is spent on anti-abortion campaigns when that money would save more unborn children if it were to be spent on research aimed at preventing spontaneous abortions.
And while we’re at it, what of twins? Again if ‘ensoulment’ begins at conception, what happens when that single person splits in half and becomes two?
There are of course many reasonable and plausible arguments for when an unborn life becomes an unborn child; the development of a more complex cell structure in the blastocyst, the successful implantation of the blastocyst in the uterus, the moment when a basic brain can be detected, the moment when pain and sensation are inferable, the moment when the fetus can be sustained outside it’s mothers womb and so on. But to claim absolutely that life begins at conception is not only dishonest, it isn’t even a very good argument given that conception isn’t truly a moment, but rather a process.
And of course you have to ask yourself why partial birth abortion elicits such disgust and anger in all people who seriously care about the preservation of life while the ‘holocaust’ of zygotes that never make it garners considerably less attention. This is obviously because we see in a fetus the features and characteristics of humanness, characteristics and features that cannot be attributed to an entity so tiny it is infinitesimal compared to a punctuation mark on this site.
Reasonable people can disagree on when life begins, reasonable people who care about the preservation of life can also claim to find no moral problems with a morning after pill that does little more than decrease the survival rate of zygotes.
This video bothers me because it is little more than a trendy disguise of a fundamentalist viewpoint that claims to know absolute truth and refuses to consider any evidence or facts contradictory to that which they already know to be true. It’s intellectually dishonest and in my opinion incredibly dangerous.