No! Those who define a woman choosing — for example — to take a pill to end an unwanted pregnancy (by far the most popular form of abortion today) and who
also purposely mis-define a distressed woman’s decision to take such action as
“the contract killing of innocent young human beings” … they are the ones being both intellectually
lazy and intentionally
demagogic.
The egg, larvae and caterpillar is not yet a butterfly.
Definitions of “life” are many and varied, as the excellent Brittanica article
Coyote linked to helps us understand.
“Human life” in the West has historically long been, and ordinarily is still, dated from birth, not from “conception.”
A six-month-old “baby” was
born six months ago. Pre-born embryos and fetuses are not “kids.” To speak otherwise is to play demagogic politics with words, to be lazy and unscientific.
Yet of course humans are usually — but not always — profoundly moved by the miracle of human life developing in the womb as well as by a baby being born and breathing its first breaths. This is natural and healthy.
Of course at a certain stage a human embryo / fetus and a pig embryo / fetus look virtually identical — and may seem to some even like a pre-born “monster” — but paternal / maternal instincts and human psychology and our general understanding of pregnancy
as a process today ordinarily dispose us to feel emotional attachment even to fetuses as they become more mature, in the same way we feel empathy toward pregnant women.
Again not everyone feels this way, especially toward pregnant women, who others — or they themselves — may not feel are nearly so “beautiful” as they once were.
Most of us are instinctually (and socially) especially sympathetic to new-born human babies. That is
very natural. But even here some don’t feel the joy happy parents normally do.
Let’s be honest here. For many, especially unrelated people, their attitude at such a time is sometimes colored by their attitude toward the mother, her financial and social status. Can she support her child? How many other children does she have? Is she married? They may secretly despise her for having a baby she is unfit to raise. Yet rightfully, or at least by modern law, nobody would dare deny the newborn baby’s legal personhood, its right to live under the protection of our laws — however inadequate those may be.
Fertile women have the almost absolute right to birth children if they desire, regardless of their status or ability to care for them.
Yet other men (and some women) seem to think that they (unrelated people), or society itself,
needs the right to legislate that these utter strangers, unwilling women of all classes, MUST carry within their bodies, give birth to and then raise up these potential future children.
So the “Moral Majority” seeks to use politicians to pass all kinds of legislation that once
any woman is carrying a zygote, embryo or fetus in her womb, no matter how unwilling she may be, she has
no right to stop the process of a pregnancy in her own body, even if it was the product of failed contraception. To make matters worse, the demagogues scream that the embryo or fetus she has just learned to her dismay is growing in her body … is an unborn “kid” with “rights” equal to her own.
The legal “personhood” of a child has in past ages usually begun with its birth as a human baby, not with its life as one of many sperm cells or unfertilized human eggs, not with conception, not with the usually unknown moment it attaches successfully to the woman’s nourishing body, and not when electrical impulses and pulsations can be observed with echocardiograms or other special instruments in cells that will or may
eventually become differentiated into a human heart!
Science cannot resolve all ethical conflicts about child-rearing nor can it determine when or whether an abortion is appropriate or “moral.” That should be left to the real person most intimately involved. Science can, however, certainly help us all to use language more clearly, organize our thoughts more clearly, and give us insights into how different people understand how becoming a “living human being” is a process of development leading to birth — which is itself only the
start of a human being’s physical independent existence.
