Here, modern science offers no clarity. If anything, the past century of scientific advances have only made the answer more complicated. Before ultrasounds and long before Roe v. Wade , it was obvious when life began. In the 19th century, abortion in Britain was legaluntil the quickening.
But the importance of the quickeninga concept that had been around since at least Aristotleis now a relic. Before a mother can feel her baby kick, at around 20 weeks, she can already hear its heartbeat and see the blurry outline of its face with ultrasound.
In a vice presidential debate, Paul Ryan explained his views on abortion by talking about seeing the bean shape of his unborn daughter on an ultrasound. In a way, science made possible the argument for fetal personhood. It's only tenable because people can peer inside the womb, at one time a black box. Indeed, when American physicians began collecting humans embryos and charting embryonic development in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they began considering fertilization as the beginning of fetal life.
Around the same time, writes historian Sara Dubow in her book Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America , some physicians began to argue that abortion should be illegal. Dubow declined to be interviewed for this story, citing concerns about being misquoted on abortion politics.
The next century of developmental biology made things even more complicated. At that same government hearing, Dr. Watson A. Bowes of the University of Colorado Medical School asserted: "The beginning of a single human life is from a biological point of view a simple and straightforward matter — the beginning is conception. This straightforward biological fact should not be distorted to serve sociological, political or economic goals.
After examining the evidence, the Senate subcommittee reported: "Physicians, biologists and other scientists agree that conception marks the beginning of the life of a human being — a being that is alive and is a member of the human species. There is overwhelming agreement on this point in countless medical, biological and scientific writings.
The 37 years of scientific advancement since that subcommittee hearing have only confirmed its findings. Children survive premature birth today at younger and younger ages, demonstrating how arbitrary it is to argue life doesn't begin until a baby is "viable.
Even many abortion advocates have come to grips with this scientific reality. Naomi Wolf, a Clinton advisor and abortion supporter, wrote in The New Republic: "Clinging to a rhetoric about abortion in which there is no life and no death, we entangle our beliefs in a series of self-delusions, fibs and evasions.
Bernard Nathanson, who co-founded the abortion advocacy group NARAL and personally presided over 60, abortions, later confessed in the film "The Silent Scream" that "Modern technologies have convinced us that beyond question the unborn child is simply another human being , another member of the human community, indistinguishable in every way from any of us. And at a panel discussion presented by the National Abortion Federation, Dr.
This oversimplifies the issues. Even if the foetus is not a human being, it is clearly regarded by most people and most societies as something special that should not be casually discarded. Various points have been suggested as the point that the foetus gets the right to life.
Here are some of those points and the arguments for and criticisms that have been made of choosing that point of development:. The 'Catechism of the Catholic Church ' states that the embryo must be treated as a person from conception and so do many others who oppose abortion This is the moment when the fertilised egg is implanted in the womb.
This happens about a week after conception. This is when the foetus first moves in the womb. This happens about 16 to 17 weeks after fertilisation. Other people take the view that life begins at the stage when the foetus could survive outside the womb.
As we've seen, there are difficulties with choosing a precise point when the unborn gets the right to live. Although it's uncomfortable to be so imprecise, the right answer may lie in accepting that there are degrees of right to life, and the foetus gets a stronger right to life as it develops. This answer has the value of reflecting the way many people feel about things when they consider abortion: the more developed the foetus, the more unhappy they are about aborting it, and the more weight they give the rights of the foetus in comparison with the rights of the mother.
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