The miracle of life is truly that – a miracle.  My wife, not too long ago, delivered our first child (James) and watching her go through the various stages of pregnancy was really something to behold.  Every week she had me read with her the different ways our baby was growing and developing inside of her via websites like webmd.com and pregnancy.org.  It was fascinating.  For instance, did you know, while babies are still the size of a head of a pin, their circulatory system has already begun to take shape and their heartbeat can be heard with sophisticated equipment?  The fact that a baby’s microscopic body has already developed many of the life support systems that he will be using for the rest of his life is truly remarkable. God’s handiwork never ceases to amaze me!  

I bring this up, not because I particularly want to chronicle everything I learned about a baby’s development inside the womb during my wife’s pregnancy, but because a critical aspect of the abortion debate rests on when human life begins.  To be sure, there are many other reasons people give for saying abortion should remain legal and these will all be fully examined in later installments.  However, establishing that life begins at conception, not at birth, is the beginning of seeing abortion for what it truly is – the termination of an innocent human life; an act society would usually call murder.

Unfortunately, our culture vastly undervalues and misunderstands the beginning of life.  Scientist and endocrinologist, Dr. George Corner, who first discovered and identified the vital hormone progesterone, which is essential to the maturing of the unborn child, described human fertilization this way:

The fertilization of an egg by the sperm is one of the great wonders of nature, an event in which magnificently small fragments of…life are driven by cosmic forces to their appointed end, the growth of a living human being.  As a spectacle, it can be compared only with an eclipse of the sun, or the eruption of a volcano. It is in fact the most common and nearest to us of nature’s cataclysms, and yet it is very seldom observed because it occurs in a realm most people never see – the region of microscopic things.

Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a co-founder of NARAL (National Abortion Rights Action League) and one of the pioneers of abortion rights in the United States, was the director of the largest abortion clinic in the world in the early 1970’s. However, as technology advanced, specifically with the introduction of the ultrasound to the medical world, he began to have increasing doubts about the validity of the abortion on demand point of view. In 1974 he wrote an article in the New England Journal of Medicine expressing some of his growing concerns. He wrote:

There is no longer serious doubt in my mind that human life exists within the womb from the very onset of pregnancy, despite the fact that the nature of intrauterine life has been the subject of considerable dispute in the past…Life is an interdependent phenomenon for all of us.  It is a continuous spectrum which begins in utero and ends in death – the bands of the spectrum are designated by words such as fetus, infant, child, adolescent and adult. We must courageously face the fact – finally – that human life of a special order is being taken [in the process of abortion], and since the vast majority of pregnancies are carried successfully to term, abortion must be seen as the interruption of a process which would otherwise have produced a citizen of the world. Denial of this reality is the crassest kind of moral evasiveness.

Hardly the words of a radical pro-life activist, but bold assertions by an abortion doctor nevertheless.  His growing conviction that abortion was the murder of a human baby eventually drove him from the business all together.  In his autobiography, The Hand of God, he writes:

I’d have to assert that human life begins even earlier, with the complex process of fertilization – a miracle in chemistry, physics, and molecular biology occurring within the fallopian tube.  By the time the fertilized egg, dividing and beginning to organize itself, enters the womb, life has been in action for at least three days…After my exposure to ultrasound, I began to rethink the prenatal phase of life.  Gradually, I began to understand that two hundred or three hundred years ago, childhood had not been understood as a special time of in our lives and that in the seventeenth century, children as young as five years old were made to work in factories.  There was no recognition of the phenomenon of childhood or of their needs until the last hundred or so years. Adolescence, adulthood, and senescence – they are all bands in the continuing spectrum of life.  When I began to study fetology, it dawned on me, finally, that the prenatal nine months are just another band in the spectrum of life.

He makes it clear that his gradual conversion from abortion doctor to pro-life activist was a “purely empirical event” and had nothing to do with a religious conversion or spiritual epiphany.  He simply recognized that modern technology allowed us to know more about life inside the womb than ever before. When he processed this new information and realized its implications, he adjusted his views accordingly.   If this was not such a serious issue I would find it amusing that the same liberals who accuse conservative Christians of ignoring scientific advances in other realms (i.e. evolution and creationism – though it is a false claim) so blatantly ignore new scientific discoveries on this front.  Of course, I use the term “new” loosely here.  Ultrasound technology has been around for decades, now, yet much of the “pro-choice” camp still refuses to acknowledge the many things we have learned from it.

C. Ward Kischer, Ph.D. is a professor emeritus of Cell Biology and Anatomy, with a specialty in Human Embryology at the University of Arizona’s College of Medicine. He is also Chairman of The American Bioethics Advisory Commission and an adult stem cell researcher.  He furthers the claim that human life begins at the moment of conception by writing:

…from the moment when the sperm makes contact with the oocyte, under conditions we have come to understand and describe as normal, all subsequent development to birth of a living newborn is a fait accompli. That is to say, after that initial contact of spermatozoon and oocyte there is no subsequent moment or stage which is held in arbitration or abeyance by the mother, or the embryo or fetus. Nor is a second contribution, a signal or trigger, needed from the male in order to continue and complete development to birth. Human development is a continuum in which so - called stages overlap and blend one into another. Indeed, all of life is contained within a time continuum. Thus, the beginning of a new life is exacted by the beginning of fertilization, the reproductive event which is the essence of life.

Recently, while on another blog, I was debating abortion with someone who was fiercely pro-choice.  We finally got to the heart of the argument when we started discussing the viability of the baby in the womb. I asked her when the magical moment was that a fetus turned into a baby.  The moment, in her mind, it would change from being the lawful abortion of a fetus to the murdering of an infant child.  She answered, “A fetus becomes a baby when it's born. That shouldn't be so hard to figure out.”  That sentiment, though all too common amongst abortion advocates, reflects a severe ignorance of the debate at hand and completely ignores the advances science has made in the last thirty years.  As Christians who value life as a gift from God, it is our job to make sure our culture understands that life begins at conception, not birth.  A fact that modern science has finally discovered, but a principle the Bible has made clear for centuries.