Abortion and Infant-personhood

I don’t know where the term “cop-out” came from, but I know what it means. It means you will not face the truth. You cling to flimsy reasoning because the solid ground of logic is too unmoving and firm. You leave before the cross-examination can be pressed into you. It means you are a coward.

That is what I thought when I read this article entitled Why Science Can’t Say When A Baby’s Life Begins by Sarah Zhang. Anyone who would hold to this kind of ambiguity, is only doing so because they want ambiguity. It is a cop-out. The article begins by saying that the beginning of personhood has been debated by theologians and philosophers for ages, and the article concludes by saying that must continue to be the case. Let me demonstrate below why this is cowardly and a cop-out of epic proportions.

Before we even get into the issue of science and personhood, there is an underlying problem with the whole article that comes out in the second paragraph. Ms. Zhang states that, “the ultimate question is, when does a fetus become a person—at fertilization, at birth, or somewhere in between?” The problem here is with the assertion that some do not recognize personhood before birth. I don’t know anyone in the mainstream who argues that a baby only becomes a person after delivery. The main argument is not whether the pre-delivered baby is a person, but whose rights must be protected. The question of the beginning of personhood is all smoke screen. If debate can be deflected to the personhood question, then the real issue of rights to life can be deferred. The pro-abortion movement knows that there is a person in the womb. This is why there is all the talk about abortion being unfortunate and regrettable and so on. Nonetheless, the pro-abortion movement has fought all the restrictions imposed upon abortion not because they don’t recognize the personhood of the baby, but because they want to preserve the desire of the mother to maintain a certain type of lifestyle.

With that said, even the smoke screen argument about science and the beginning of personhood is a cop-out. Let me give you the science that is stated in the article. The article states how the beginning of life has only gotten more complicated as science advances. It begins with just one historical note about infant development called the “quickening.” This was when a baby was felt kicking at around 20 weeks. It quickly moves to the scientific advances of the 20th century that allow us to see into the womb and ultimately into the very process of fertilization. Ms. Zhang then gets more detailed. But the details are meant to obscure rather than clarify. It is stated that fertilization is more of a process than a precise moment, taking hours or even a day or more. And implementation is the next step that often fails and spontaneous abortions follow. Finally, Ms. Zhang says that if everything does go right, different doctors will say personhood starts at different times. The embryologist may say at gastrulation (somewhere around a week), or a neurologist may say when brain waves can be measured (six weeks). The Roe v. Wade decision says abortions are limited by viability of the baby outside the womb, which is an imprecise time that keeps getting earlier and earlier.

Here is why all of that is a cop-out; it ignores the nature of humanness and entire cultures we build on that reality. This is not the stuff of theologians and philosophers. It is a cop-out to say that. Regular people who vote, and lawyers, and judges all make laws, and build societies, and create cultural norms upon the varied stations of life that people find themselves in. People are people whether they are big or small, old or young, smart or dull, productive or crippled. Humans are humans whether they can talk or not, whether they can move or not, or a thousand other situations we find ourselves in. It is a cop-out to say that there are developmental stages that determine personhood. There are always developmental stages. It just happens that the first ones are when you are very small and in a unique environment called a womb. It doesn’t matter if you have a fully developed brain yet, or can’t feel pain yet. Some people never have a fully developed brain and they are still persons. Some people never feel pain and they are still persons. We all understand this, and we don’t question personhood in those instances. The acronym S.L.E.D. is helpful here. It stands for Size, Level of development, Environment, and Dependency. None of those things affect human personhood, because if they did the toddler could be electively killed. The toddler is very small, not fully developed, and completely dependent upon others.

Science has clearly shown us that a human life begins at fertilization. To try to divide personhood from humanness is only done in the darkness of human oppression: such as when women, slaves, Indians, and Jews were denied full personhood. Everything that makes a human a human is there at fertilization, and personhood is a part of humanness. Whether that new person survives past the first few hours is beside the point. The point is that it is a very small human, and therefore that person is made in the image of God. As such, it must be protected with all the resources we have available to us as good neighbors who happen to have addresses outside the womb.

Let us not be cowards and accept or ignore this cop-out. We must see the full impact of the science, speak against the oppression even in the face of hostility, take in the orphan, care for the scared mother, and love like Christ.