Quick Apology: Doing whatever you want with your body?

Today’s post is a follow-up to the one last Thursday. In response to my comments about the differences between circumcision and abortion, a friend-of-a-friend offered a reply. However, rather than responding to what I said, he simply trotted out a favourite slogan of the pro-choice moment. Here was our exchange:

Bodies

“My body, my choice” is one of the favourite sayings of those who favour the continued legal access to abortion. However, the statement is patently false and I would suggest that nobody really believes it.

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Identifying Humanity

Last January I had a discussion on Facebook in which the person with whom I was speaking made the bold claim that the unborn “aren’t human yet”. An interesting assertion! I responded with two questions:

Question #1: “What kind of offspring do human parents have?”

Question #2: “What do you call an organism with human DNA?”

Of course, the answer to both of these questions is “human”. Unfortunately, my friend chose to ignore both of these questions, so I asked another:

“If a fetus in his mother’s womb isn’t human…what is he? To what species does he then belong?”

Once again, this question went answered. To assert that the unborn aren’t human requires that they be something else. I asked repeatedly what that “something else” was, but I never got an answer…

The Line Up

Eventually, my friend posted the following image:

Screen Shot 2016-02-07 at 5.04.48 PM

From left-to-right, this picture shows embryos from different species: zebrafish, chicken, dog, human and skink. Although he didn’t articulate it, it appeared that he thought that being unable to visually identify the human fetus somehow proved that the it wasn’t human.
This is, of course, terrible logic. If I don’t know the answer to a question on a quiz show, does that mean that no answer exists? Of course not, it just means that I don’t have the right information at my fingertips.

Ocular Pat DownThere are lots of things which aren’t easy to identify with the naked eye.  An unmarked bottle of sulfuric acid (H2SO4) can look very similar to a bottle of water (H20). If I placed an unmarked bottle of each liquid in front of you, would a visual inspection be enough to convince you to take a drink from one of them? Of course not! What would need to happen in order to make you drink with confidence? You’d want to run more conclusive tests than a simple visual inspection.

In the same way, just because I can’t easily see from an image whether or not a fetus is a human fetus, doesn’t change the fetus’ species. It’s true that the naked eye can’t easily give you the answer to that question, but appropriate scientific examination can! In this case, a simple DNA test could give you a conclusive answer as to the species of each of the above embryos.

Biologically speaking, it is impossible to declare that the unborn are anything less than human. If they are indeed human, it would follow that, as such, even the unborn should be treated with respect and dignity.

Names for the unborn

Following on from yesterday’s post, recent discussions on Facebook have reminded me of how the abortion debate often turns around the question of language.

A few months ago I had posted an article about abortion and one of my friends wrote this response:

“You’re going to have a hard time convincing someone zygote development at 4 weeks is a fetus… When we talk in terms of a 6 week fetus it’s probably closer to bundles of cells than it is to a fetus…”

My friend’s response shows why it’s important to have a good grasp of biology when speaking about the unborn. What do we mean when we use words like “zygote”, “embryo” and “fetus”?

Development

“Zygote”, “embryo” and “fetus” are all simply labels which describe the developmental stage of the human child, much like “infant”, “toddler” or “teenager”. A zygote is a diploid cell which is the result of fertilization of an egg by a sperm. After about twenty-four hours, cell division begins and we move from the zygote phase of development to the embryonic. After eight weeks, we move from the embryonic to the fetal.

Hopefully it’s now clear as to why I’d never try to convince someone that “zygote development at 4 weeks is a fetus”…because it’s not! It would be as nonsensical as talking about an eight-year-old toddler or a twenty-year-old teenager.

Developmental Cheat Sheet

Zygote: Human development within the first 24 hours

Embryo: After 24 hours of life, when cell division has begun. It remains in this stage for the first eight weeks.

Fetus: A development stage following eight weeks of life up until birth.

Infant: Up to twelve months after birth

Toddler: 1-3 years after birth

Adolescent: The time after birth when conversation is exchanged for incoherent grunts and parents are treated as a cross between an ATM and a taxi service.

Regardless of the name we use to describe someone’s age, all humans deserve to be protected.

Quick Apology: Potential Life?

In January there was the annual “March For Life” in Washington DC. Unfortunately, I couldn’t go this year, but thanks to Facebook, I got to defend life in a different way, through Facebook. Many of my pro-life friends posted about the March on Facebook, and these posts were not without their detractors…

unborn

The Objection

As I browsed my newsfeed, one objection which was made repeatedly was some variation of the following:

“The fetus is a potential life”

Is this true? How might we respond to this statement?
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Don’t be too eager to hit “Share”

Back in the early days of this blog, I wrote a post entitled Don’t be too eager to hit “Send”. In that post I spoke about how it’s prudent to exercise caution when sending email, particularly when you’re in a bad mood, as it’s very easy to send someone a nasty message which you may soon come to regret. Today’s post is something of a companion piece: Don’t be too eager to hit “Share”…

facbook-like-and-share-thumbs-up

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