A pro-life agnostic?
Someone asked me once to explain why I leaned
The preconception is that to be pro-life you must be a bible-thumper, viagra sales treatment a woman-hater, physician or both.
To the confusion of many folks on either side of the
I have many reasons for believing abortion is wrong, but one of the main ones is simply the fact that I prefer sharply drawn lines.
I like objective criteria and when it comes to when a person becomes a person, there are only two sharply drawn lines: birth and conception.
While there may be a few fanatical pro-choicers who might argue that it’s not a baby until the last toe leaves the vagina, most folks recognize that a baby is as much a person a minute before it’s born as it is a minute afterwards.
That leaves conception as the only bright line.
Before conception, there’s nothing but a couple of 1/2 complete cells. Afterwards, there’s a genetically distinct life that any unbiased outside observer would have to qualify as belonging to the human species.
Is it the person that it will become?
No.
But it has passed the one true boundary between potential human life and inevitable human life.
You can argue as much as you want about viability, but with the continuing advance of medical technology that line keeps moving further and further back. Many babies that are “viable” now, would not have been at the time of Roe vs. Wade. But conception is the line that doesn’t move. And it’s the only logical place to say, “before this there was nothing…after this there is everything.”
7 comments February 14th, 2008