Human beings aren’t valuable because of a function they perform, how conscious they are, whether they feel pain, or any other extrinsic quality. These things come in degrees. Humanity doesn’t come in degrees.
I shocked a faculty member at the University of California while conversing with him in the middle of campus. He was defending abortion using the reasons popularly offered to justify it. He said, “It’s a decision between a woman, her doctor, and her God.” He brought up the idea that if abortion were made illegal, women would be forced into dangerous, back-alley abortions. He emphatically said, “Woman should have the right to choose.” Then I shocked him.
I agreed. I said, “Of course we shouldn’t interfere with a woman, her doctor, and her God. We shouldn’t force any woman into a dangerous, back-alley abortion.” I said, “A woman should have the right to choose…if….” “If what?” he asked. I knew this was where the conversation really started.
Often, we lose sight of the main issue in the abortion debate. The fundamental question we must ask is, “What is the unborn?” Abortion involves the killing and discarding of something that’s alive. We all know it’s alive because it’s growing. That’s the “problem” abortion seeks to address. And whether it’s right or not to intentionally take the life of this living being depends entirely upon the answer to one question: “What kind of being is it?”
Most defenses of abortion assume the unborn is not a human being. Think about it. Privacy and choice are not valid reasons to kill born human beings. This means that if the unborn is a human being just like you and me, you can’t kill her for the same reasons you can’t kill a born human being. If the unborn is not a human being, there’s no issue to debate. If the unborn is not a human being, no justification for abortion is necessary. However, if the unborn is a human being, no justification for abortion is adequate. That’s why we have to first answer the question “What is the unborn?” To answer this, we’ll turn to embryology.
We know from embryology—the study of the earliest stages of life—that human life comes into existence when two gametes (sperm and egg) fuse to form a living zygote. The science of embryology tells us the unborn is a living, unique, human being.