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Overview - Abortion
Then there’s the Pro-Life movement—another sad story altogether. They’ve stood faithfully and bravely for the sacredness of human life during pregnancy and moral responsibilities involved. But they have done so in a sanctimonious and histrionic manner that casts any semblance of reason and scientific literacy to the winds. At worst they’ve resorted to deception, moral contradiction, and carelessness with facts so severe that they’ve likely contributed to global abortions and the suffering and death of mothers and infants alike (and I’m not referring to abortion clinic bombers, who’s actions I’m sure we all agree, speak for themselves).
If Pro-Choice advocates are flippant about fetal humanity, Pro-Life advocates' defenses of it are often downright absurd. Most believe that it begins at conception, and at first blush there’s something to be said for this. It is easily identifiable as the beginning of the gestation process. It’s also the beginning of a genetically unique life—one that at full term will be distinctly different from both mother and father.
But in the First World at least, a significant majority of Pro-Life advocates are Christians—mainly Catholic and conservative Evangelical—communities for which the conception argument creates far more problems than it solves. Once fertilized, a zygote will remain in suspension in the uterus for up to six days before implanting in the uterine wall. Only at this point does it begin drawing the sustenance it needs from the mother to continue to term. This process is somewhat haphazard however, and 30-60% of all fertilized zygotes are passed in menstruation before doing so. Of those that do implant, another 25% will naturally miscarry prior to 8 weeks gestation (6 weeks development) for any number of natural reasons that are purely random (Smart et al., 1982; Kennedy, 1997; Wilcox et al., 1999). 8% will self-terminate later (Wang et al, 1999).
In other words, for predominately natural reasons 55-85% of all conceptions self-terminate prior to 6 weeks development, and 63-93% will never go full term. Christians, me included, believe that God created us and destined us to be in loving relationship with Him and each other. If this is how He designed our physiology then one of two things must be true. Either He gets a big enough bang out of abortion to merit eradicating a large majority of the human race, or human life as He sees it does not begin at conception—perhaps not even until sometime well after 6 weeks development.
It’s difficult to see how Pro-Life Christians (i.e. nearly all Pro-Lifers) can credibly avoid this. Few of us would accept that we were not created by God. It’s central to our theology. Fewer still are prepared to admit that abortion is the neatest thing since pull tabs on pop cans. Some have argued that implantation failure no more disproves an embryo’s humanity in God’s eyes than death by natural causes does in other circumstances, which is true but begs the question. If life begins at conception in God’s eyes we’re still left to wonder why He would have designed the human fertility cycle to function this way in the first place.
Others might argue that this is a consequence of Creation being corrupted by the fall of humanity into sin, which the Bible does teach as having some sort of impact on the natural world and/or our relationship to it (Gen. 3:14-18; Rom. 8:22). Fundamentalists often rely on variations of this theme to explain (or explain away...) many inconvenient facts of nature. But it’s a textbook example of an ad-hoc argument. Virtually nothing in our knowledge of human physiology suggests that human fertility ever worked any differently or that it even could. From scientific and Biblical perspectives, this is no different than arguing that invisible abortion demons with ray guns are interfering with pregnancy. It never even would’ve been thought up, much less defended if Pro-Lifers weren’t in need of a justification for their belief that human life begins at conception (ever heard of Occam’s razor?...). In the end, it’s more to the point to just accept that the beginning of human life is complex—even mysterious—and easy formulas aren’t going to spare us from having to wrestle with the questions.
Pro-Life arguments about fetal suffering aren’t much better. Here we’re subjected to impassioned sermons about “babies” peacefully bonding with mother and “silently screaming” during abortions, peppered here and there with scientific arguments for fetal awareness that cannot withstand even two minutes worth of scrutiny. For instance, Focus on the Family’s Thinkaboutit.com web site argues that at 8 weeks gestation,
“Everything is now present that will be found in a fully developed adult. The heart has been beating for more than a month, the stomach produces digestive juices and the kidneys have begun to function. Forty muscle sets begin to operate in conjunction with the nervous system.
The fetus' body responds to touch, although the woman carrying the fetus will not be able to feel movement until the fourth or fifth month.
In other words, the fetus feels the mother, but the mother doesn't feel the fetus.”
The National Right to Life web site is even more dramatic. According to their Diary of an Unborn Baby page,
- By Week 6 “brain waves are detectable.”
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