When does human life begin?


Let’s start with some basics. Prior to uniting during fertilization, a human sperm and a human egg are both alive and human. That they are both human is undeniable, based on their sourcing. That they are alive can easily be demonstrated by autoclaving them and then testing whether they can still participate in fertilization (they can’t; autoclaving kills gametes). So in a real and meaningful sense, human life precedes fertilization. Indeed, there has been no point in the history of our species when human life began, since it is a continuum. Are you with me so far?
So if by “human life,” you mean human diploid life, then does it begin when the sperm head (containing the paternal haploid complement) fuses with the oocyte (containing the maternal haploid complement)? Well, no, because it takes several hours for the two pro-nuclei to fuse. Then there’s the small matter of when the zygote implants in the uterus. Without implantation, the zygote is lost. Many human conceptuses are lost that way. Don’t blame science; that’s just God’s will.
But each conceptus is a genetically unique individual, since both gametes are products of both meiotic recombination and independent assortment. Well, as the fertilized egg divides and divides again and the cells proliferate, there is a significant period of time during which the zygote can break apart. This is the basis for monozygotic twinning (identical twins). If unique human life began at conception, then is one of these identical (and therefore not genetically unique) twins human life and the other not? Since they are genetically identical, one is just a back-up, right?
Human conception is terribly inefficient. Most conceptuses don’t make it to birth, due to genetic defects. Most of this loss occurs during the first trimester. So God is the greatest abortionist of all time. Maybe God is telling us something—that S/He doesn’t consider human tissue to be a human life worth protecting until after the first trimester?
If a cluster of human cells is a human life that demands legal protection, then what about a wart? What about amputation? What about expired blood donations? And finally, what about the millions of zygotes in freezers of fertility clinics? If a freezer thaws, is that mass murder?
Look, if your religion tells you that legally human life begins at conception, then you are confusing church and state. Don’t have an abortion, but you don’t have a right to have the nanny state enforce your personal religious beliefs. And don’t draft science to support your forced-birth beliefs. Science doesn’t establish the idea that there is any single point at which “human life begins.”
Like
Comment
Share

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Two sides

Image
  Yes, there are two sides to every question. In most cases, there is a correct side and a wrong side. In the case of Kamala Harris, the correct side is that she was born a US citizen. The wrong side is that her parents had to be citizens or permanent residents for her to be a citizen. President Trump pretended to be unsure about this, just as he pretended for five years that Barack Obama is not a citizen. In the case of the Harris noncitizen claim, it is backed by the racist C laremont Institute: "The Claremont Institute masquerades as an intellectual salon of the right, but it is really just a racist fever swamp with deep connections to the conspiratorial alt-right. It even granted a fellowship to Jack Posobiec, who helped promote the notorious Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Claremont’s resident bigots offer deranged fantasies of violently expelling Americans from their home country because of their ethnic backgrounds. Their work deserves the intellectual weight given to that of D...
Read more

Who chooses?

Over at jabberwocking.com , Kevin Drum blames pro-choice writers for failing to make the case for reproductive choice. Well, from everything I've read, a clear majority of Americans believe that Roe should still stand. Seems like the case has been made, and if we lived in a truly representative democracy, a limited national right to abortion would be preserved. But beyond that reality, I think Drum has it exactly backwards. Why does the burden of proof fall on those advocating for personal autonomy? Seems to me the null hypothesis is that women should be allowed to make decisions about their own health, and that the justification for nanny state intrusion into such decisions rests with the minority who assert state coercion. Democrats need to hammer on the right-wing GOP to explain why the government takes temporary custody of pregnant Americans. https://jabberwocking.com/liberals-really-suck-at-defending-abortion/
Read more

Black Earth

 Just finished reading “Black Earth: The Holocaust as history and warning” by Timothy Snyder. It is a detailed account of the Holocaust, as well as an effort to abstract lessons from this history for our time. Like his book “Bloodlands,” Snyder’s “Black Earth” makes for painful reading. As the grandson of a Ukrainian Jew and the son of a Jew, I would have been targeted in the Holocaust had I been in the wrong place. I had read several histories of Europe in World War II that included the Holocaust. I knew the basic story of the Holocaust and Hitler’s anti-Semitic vision. I learned a great deal by reading this book. I won’t belabor the ghoulish atrocities committed by the Nazis and their collaborators. To summarize them here would be to trivialize the enormity of the crimes and invite pointless debate about who did what and who suffered more. You’ll have to read the book to understand Snyder’s historical insights. However, I learned many things that I did not know by reading thi...
Read more