Abortion

Iowa recently passed an abortion bill that is the strictest in the nation.  Governor Kim Reynolds signed the bill, and it will become law July 1, 2018, unless the legislation is challenged in the courts.

The premise of the legislation is that a detectable heartbeat establishes the embryo as a living human.  If the embryo is a child, it is entitled to protection from abortion. Embryonic heartbeats can be detected at about six weeks (42 days).  As a related aside, electrical brain activity begins at about 43 days.  

This bill presents a major problem for advocates of “pro-choice” since women are often unaware they are pregnant this early in the gestation process.  They will argue that it is fundamentally unfair (or unconstitutional) to make abortion illegal in a timeframe shorter than pregnancy awareness.  The “awareness” argument is a strong one if only woman’s rights are considered.  Most people would find it difficult to agree that a being with a detectable heartbeat is not actually alive, however.

Arguments about the point at which human life begins are ongoing, but they tend to be driven by ideology rather than science.  For example, one argument contends that life begins at “viability”, which generally means the  point at which a fetus can survive outside the womb.  The fundamental problem with the viability argument is that it is a dodge.  Survivability outside the womb is a different issue than whether the subject is a human being.  One-year-olds are not “viable” either; leave such a child alone and without care for any length of time—a couple days, I suppose, and this child will die, too.  This kind of care-withholding is judged as murder once a child is born.  The very idea of viability is becoming a decreasingly useful argument for those who advocate for abortion rights.  In the 70s, technology could keep premature children alive after 26 weeks.  Today that line has moved back to about 22 weeks.  Clearly “viability” is more of a measure of science’s advancing capacity to mimic the womb than it is indicative of life in the unborn.

Others argue that the ability to detect a heartbeat is what indicates a live human.  This is the basis of the Iowa legislation.  The intent of the Iowa legislation is to reduce the number of abortions taking place in Iowa.  For this I give the Iowa legislature and Governor my thanks and full support.  Even so, the basis on which the legislation is built makes little sense.  The regulation is not based on whether the child is alive—it is based on the measuring capacity of certain machines.  As it happens, scientific research has made it clear that the human heart starts to beat at 21 or 22 days (3 weeks after conception).  So it is evident that the heart beats at three weeks, while the legislation is formulated on the sensitivity of listening equipment.  As a practical matter, being able to demonstrate a live being makes a great deal of sense.  Even so, with what is known about heartbeat initiation, logic demands that all three-week-old embryos be allowed to live to six weeks in order to give them a chance to be heard.

Arguments for the detection of brain activity are also problematic.  For adults, brain activity tests are meaningful for determining whether they are still alive.  For the unborn, such tests are as significant as a test to see whether the embryo can throw a baseball (or a ball bearing).  If brain activity can be detected at 43 days, testing for brain activity at, say, 40 days would determine that all those tested are not alive.  However, from another direction, it is also true that every living person today would have failed the brain “life” test at 40 days.  Since this is so, it is clear that any brain activity test in an embryo prior to 43 days would be completely useless information.

Some argue that an embryo is not human until implantation in the uterine wall, since failure to implant terminates the embryo.  This argument is bolstered by the statistic that 50% of fertilized eggs fail to implant.  This, too, is lame logic.  One could similarly argue that a high percentage of teenagers fail to live to age thirty and, therefore, (and because teenagers are intolerable) it is fair and reasonable to shoot them in the head while they are sleeping.  Accidental death has never been equated with murder.  There is a clear difference between process failure and sabotage. 

In the larger abortion debate, there seems to be little attention given to a well understood scientific fact.  That is, a “zygote” is formed by the union of an egg and a sperm.  The egg and sperm each contribute 23 chromosomes to form the 46 chromosomes of the zygote.  The zygote has much developing to go through and many hurdles to cross.  It may not survive 10 days…or 90 days…or 90 years, but it has the full potential to do so.

The zygote contains all the information and functionality necessary to organize itself into a highly differentiated adult human being, as well as the information and functionality to form the placenta and the umbilical cord. 

There is a wide range of estimates for this figure, but the human body is eventually made up of around 37.2 trillion cells.  (If we could just get those cells to each sweat out a 50 cent piece, one person would be able to pay for the U.S. national debt.)  None of us are smart enough to construct ourselves.  All of us together are not smart enough to come up with the design structure of a zygote.  Such practices as cloning must make use of this pre-existing design work.  In a very real sense, the human zygote, conscious or not, is far far more intelligent than a fully developed human.  We know that, left undisturbed, about 1/3 of zygotes will fully form and be born as babies.  The zygote requires nutrition and shelter—nothing else.  Which statement is wishful thinking: that a zygote is non-human, or that a zygote is human? 

Our society is committed to self-delusion.  We are unwilling to face the overwhelming evidence that life begins at conception.  The reason we quibble, hem, haw, split hairs, and twist into pretzels is that we don’t want to face (to borrow from Al Gore) the “inconvenient truth” of unwanted pregnancy. 

We murder our children and are fine with it.  I don’t mean that individuals don’t agonize over the decision.  Nor would I discount the reality of the guilt that haunts many parents of the aborted.  What I mean is that, as a society, we have punted the responsibility of abortion to individual pregnant women.  We have essentially ruled that the embryo may not be human, and that women have the right to weigh the cost/impact of bearing a child vs. terminating the life of that embryo…or fetus. 

More than 54 million abortions have been performed in the United States since 1973.  Roughly 1.5 billion abortions have been performed in the world since 1980—40 million per year.  World War II was a schoolyard dust-up compared to the destruction of lives legalized through worldwide abortion.  The 21st century is easily the most barbaric time of all human history.  We take lots of showers but we are not clean.

“I am weary of hearing of the concept of the ‘right of control over a woman’s body’ illogically applied to the right of abortion on demand.  The pertinent science is settled; one need only consult a human embryology textbook.  Once fertilization occurs, there is a new human being formed, with new DNA.  Any action upon this new human is action upon someone else’s body.  Abortion kills someone else with different DNA.  You may still cling to this “right” but you must call it what it is.  I am curious as to why those people who promote abortion are never designated as “anti-science”… — Dr. Elisa Winterstein

Are there other issues related to the issue of abortion?  Absolutely.  It’s hard to know where to begin.  There is context to the proliferation of abortion.

Our society has embraced Free Love.  Is it free?  Is it love?  Do we need to take a more careful look at the impacts of this practice?  Do we need to educate better about the emotional and financial benefits of marriage, particularly for children?  What does it mean to be married?  Our society is presently looking at the issue of the sexual exploitation of women.  How does sexual exploitation contribute to abortion?  Do women exploit men’s interest in female sexuality?  Are laws requiring support of children by mother and father strict enough?  Are social services in this country sufficient to care for the impoverished?  Is medical care available for all our citizens?  How does abortion relate to capital punishment?  To euthanasia?  Is the measure of a society how it cares for its weak?  If so, is it hypocrisy to expect to be treated with justice while dismissing the rights of the unborn?  Does a dismissive perspective towards the unborn generate callousness towards others in society?  Do we need to learn more as a society about deemphasizing possessions (and enviable experiences), while emphasizing the value of humans?  

All these issues and, no doubt, others are parts of the context that have turned our society into an abortion mill, a culture of death.  

It is clear that the preservation of human life in our society is an effort of swimming upstream.  We, as a nation, do not have to lose our collective soul; we, as individuals, do not have to lose our souls.  We can live as those who love life, pre-cradle-to-grave.  (And as a Christian I will say… “and after”.)