A few years ago, when my wife was pregnant with our firstborn son, James, she made sure I kept abreast of his development inside her womb. Every week she had me read with her the different ways our baby was growing and developing inside of her via websites like webmd.com and pregnancy.org. It was fascinating. For instance, did you know, while babies are still the size of the head of a pin, their circulatory systems have already begun to take shape and their heartbeats can be heard with sophisticated equipment? The fact that a baby’s microscopic body has already developed many of the life support systems he will be using for the rest of his life is just stunning.
I bring this up not because I particularly want to chronicle everything I learned about a baby’s development inside the womb during my wife’s pregnancy, but because a critical aspect of the abortion debate rests on when human life begins. To be sure, there are many other reasons people give for saying abortion should remain legal and these will all be fully examined in time. However, establishing that life begins at conception, not at birth, is the beginning of seeing abortion for what it truly is – the termination of an innocent human life – an act a civilized society would usually define as murder.
Unfortunately, our culture vastly undervalues and misunderstands the beginning of life. First, there is only a fraction of emotional attachment to babies that have yet to be born as compared to babies that are already born. Babies still developing in the womb look different than the rest of us. Many have a hard time fighting for the rights and liberties of people that they cannot even see. For these and a variety of other reasons, American society has been reluctant to grant babies in the embryonic and fetal stages of life the same rights and liberties we grant to all other persons.
A few years ago, while on another blog, I debated abortion with someone who was fiercely pro-choice. We finally got to the heart of the argument when we started discussing the viability of the baby in the womb. I asked her when the magical moment was that a fetus turned into a baby. The moment, in her mind, it would change from being the lawful abortion of a fetus to the murder of an infant child. She answered, “A fetus becomes a baby when it's born. That shouldn't be so hard to figure out.” That sentiment, though all too common amongst abortion advocates, reflects a severe ignorance of the debate at hand and completely ignores the advances science has made in the last thirty years. Indeed, the scientific consensus, as we shall see, is clear: life begins at conception, not birth.
In fact, scientists have been proclaiming this for decades. As early as 1947 in his book, The Hormones in Human Reproduction, Dr. George Corner, the Princeton research scientist who first isolated and identified the vital female hormone progesterone, identified the fertilization process as the beginning of human life:
The fertilization of an egg by the sperm is one of the great wonders of nature, an event in which magnificently small fragments of…life are driven by cosmic forces to their appointed end, the growth of a living human being. As a spectacle, it can be compared only with an eclipse of the sun, or the eruption of a volcano.
Dr. Bernard Nathanson, once a pioneer for abortion rights and a leading abortionist, radically converted to a pro-life ideology, quitting his profession and livelihood. He did this as technology and science advanced, allowing doctors and scientists to learn more and more about the unborn baby in its embryonic and fetal stages. In his autobiography The Hand of God, Nathanson concluded:
I’d have to assert that human life begins even earlier, with the complex process of fertilization – a miracle in chemistry, physics, and molecular biology occurring within the fallopian tube. By the time the fertilized egg, dividing and beginning to organize itself, enters the womb, life has been in action for at least three days.
Nathanson makes it clear that his gradual conversion from abortionist to pro-life activist was a “purely empirical event” and had nothing to do with a religious conversion or spiritual epiphany. He simply recognized that modern technology allowed us to know more about life inside the womb than ever before. When he processed this new information and realized its implications, he adjusted his views accordingly.
Though this claim was contested in Corner’s and Nathanson’s time, it is now accepted as scientific fact. In embryology and biology textbooks, conception is taught as the beginning of human life. Here are just a few other
leading doctors and scientists in this field who attest to this fact:
Dr. Hymie Gordon (Mayo Clinic): “By all criteria of modern molecular biology, life is present from the moment of conception.”
Dr. Micheline Matthews-Roth (Harvard University Medical School): “It is scientifically correct to say that an individual human life begins at conception.”
Dr. Alfred Bongioanni (University of Pennsylvania): “I have learned from my earliest medical education that human life begins at the time of conception.”
Dr. Jerome LeJeune, “the Father of Modern Genetics” (University of Descartes, Paris): “To accept the fact that after fertilization has taken place a new human has come into being is no longer a matter of taste or opinion … it is plain experimental evidence.”
It is now simply recognized that human embryos are as human in essence as a human adult, albeit in a different stage of life. This shouldn’t be such a surprise; this is exactly how human life develops – in stages. So while I am in adulthood and other humans are in childhood or adolescence, we are all human in our nature and essence. This is exactly the argument Robert George and Christopher Tollefsen express in their book Embryo. While refuting the common argument that states since an acorn and oak tree are different, so an embryo and human being must be different, too, they write:
So to say … that embryos and human beings are different kinds of things, or that acorns and oaks are different kinds of things, is true only if one focuses exclusively on accidental characteristics – size, shape, degree of development, and so on. But this is not how biological taxonomy works …What we are seeking to identify by the notion of a species is not some set of accidental characteristics, but rather the essential nature shared by some set of beings across various stages of development.
Last May, for the first time in its polling history,
Gallup found that more Americans identified themselves as “pro-life” than “pro-choice.”
When Gallup first began polling on this issue, in 1995, only 33% identified themselves as “pro-life.” In less than fifteen years, American public opinion has shifted by nearly twenty percentage points – a remarkable swing! Among the many reasons for this shift, are the many advances made in the scientific study of the embryonic and fetal development of unborn babies. As the science becomes more and more pronounced, expect public attitudes to continue to shift toward pro-life positions. For the American public now knows what science has now proclaimed for decades: human life begins at conception not birth. 
