Joseph: Opinion Polls Can't Change the Scientific Truth About When Life Begins
Truth endures. It is unchanging. It can’t be amended by political maneuvering. It survives unjust laws and outlasts even the most predominant ideological errors of any era.
The truth that abortion kills a lively new human being remains true. It was recognized historically by the Founders and by the medical and legal professions at that time. Now, in modern times, embryology and fetology reaffirm this enduring truth.
Opinion polls and ballots remain useful to politicians, but they are useless in altering scientific facts. Elected majorities can never legitimately dehumanize those smallest human beings “chosen” for lethal “treatment” while in their mothers’ wombs.
So when the most recent Gallup poll shows that 69 percent of Americans think first-trimester abortions should be legal, it may be a political fact of great interest to politicians running in the next election.
But it can’t change the scientific fact that first-trimester abortions kill our smallest and most vulnerable human beings. Indeed, this first stage of human life is the time of the most vigorous growth and liveliness in our whole lives.
Both science and reason tell us: The victims of abortion are human beings.
Science and reason affirm that each unique life is from conception an unbroken continuum severed only by death.
At fertilization, a new human being comes into existence — no longer a bunch of cells but a new life distinct from both the father’s sperm and the mother’s egg. This new human being is a child with DNA different from his parents.
Through every stage of human life, both reason and science tell us that this individual is one and the same human being with the same unique human identity.
This scientific truth brings us to moral truths.
The whole point of an abortion is to destroy a life that is already in existence, vibrant with promise. If the procedure doesn’t take the life of a small human being in her or his mother’s womb, then it’s not a successful abortion.
Popular practice, widespread public approval, political agreement and official sanction — none of these can change a human being at the embryonic or fetal stage of life into a non-human being, a disposable thing.
Nor can they make a moral wrong such as the killing of these smallest, most innocent human beings into a moral right.
Maintaining anonymity
The impersonal medical textbook term “the fetus” may be appropriate for use in academic, theoretical or clinical discourse. But that term was surely not appropriate in the legal context of Roe v. Wade, in which the appellant alleged upfront that “the fetus is not a human being.”
The problem with this allegation is that we can’t unknow what we all do know: Our common sense tells us, as it did the framers of the Constitution, that a pregnant mother is “with child.”
Thomas Paine in his pamphlet “Common Sense” recognized “the natural rights of all mankind” and “the equal rights of nature.” It is “the common reason of mankind” that confirms that this child in utero has a human nature. Even at this fetal stage of human life, each child is already a human being, a daughter or son, a part of all mankind.
Sadly, such logic is rejected today by pro-abortion ideologues. If some doubt (however speculative) can be sustained that the fetus is not a human being, then, they reason, destroying the fetus is just fine.
The constitutional duty “to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and to our Posterity” is completely ignored by abortion advocates. The newest members of “our Posterity” are denigrated as less than human, not deserving of human rights protection.
A bogus new legal principle
Dishonest restriction of language has been critical to pro-abortion success. The mother and the father need not be mentioned lest the natural duties to their child should impinge on the preferred ideological dogma of the day that “the woman” has absolute ownership rights over “the fetus.”
This dogma is expressed pithily in the popular slogan, “My body, my choice.”
The other little body present in a pregnant mother’s womb and targeted for abortion remains unnamed, unheeded and thus may be unlamented when deliberately killed, removed and incinerated.
Polls can’t alter the truth that in every pregnancy there is already present a unique little human being, a new daughter or son alive and growing with exquisitely ordered self-determination in her or his mother’s womb.
Yet this truth is set aside today as each human being at the fetal stage of life is effectively prepped for abortion by first being de-personalized. She or he is disconnected verbally from humanity, from her or his own mother, father and family.
The child and mother recede into obscurity — all that is recognized is “the fetus” and “the woman.”
A “pregnancy” is “terminated” — that was the dismissive language employed by Justice Harry Blackmun. The implication is clear: Until “viability,” all pregnancies are childless and all abortions are victimless.
But both science and reason tell us that these are real mothers with real children who need our help and love and care.
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