Scientifically Pro-life

You know, being pro-life is less avant-garde nowadays. Current polling (as of the time of this writing) indicates that the majority of people call themselves pro life. For reference, here’s a link to the Gallup poll results:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/118399/more-americans-pro-life-than-pro-choice-first-time.aspx

So I know that 51% of you agree with me. That’s pretty good backing. To the other 49%, I thought I would make an appeal. I don’t expect to convince too many people to change their views on such a hot topic, but I would like you to understand how I’ve come to my conclusions. (If you haven’t written my off as a radical religious conservative wacko, then I have a shot at this. If you have, well, I can live with that too, but I’ll still give it a shot.)

Don’t worry; I’m not going to take a religious approach with this. Yes, I am a Christian, but if I have to convert you to a religion to convince you of a policy, then I’m probably not going to get very far.

Instead of approaching this from the vantage point of a Christian, I’m going to approach it from the vantage point of an engineer. Enough people group us in with the scientists that we can go to most of the same parties. Thus I claim the right to discuss things from a scientific perspective.

It’s well documented that the genetic structure is defined at the moment of conception, and this is not a new concept. What has developed is our understanding of how much that means. People used to think of this in terms of eye color, hair color and height, and that’s about it. Now we’ve learned that the genetic structure influences almost every aspect of a person. When people say “he got that from his grandfather,” it has a real scientific meaning now.

So when we are dealing with a fetus, we are dealing with a person. That much people understand. The fact that we can use ultrasound to watch this person grow inside the mother aids in this understanding. Everyone has seen these pictures. Yeah, it’s a tiny baby, but it’s a baby none the less.

One of the oldest arguments for right to choose, is that if the fetus cannot survive outside the womb, then it cannot be considered a person. This always confused me, because a newborn baby can’t survive all that long outside the womb on its own. Heck, let’s go further. How many parents would feel comfortable leaving your kid home alone for a week? True Macaulay Culkin did fine, but it was obviously a questionable thing. If self sufficiency is our measure of whether a person is a person or not, then a parent can kill their child as long as they’re living under the parents’ roof.

If that seems like a silly line of argument, then let us look for the line of demarcation. Obviously a one celled child can’t make it on his or her own. However, babies are born radically premature almost every day, with a fantastic survival rate. So somewhere between point A and point B, we have a survivable human being. Where is that point? When does a child really become a human being? Is it determined by the ability of our doctors to keep the kid going? Is our definition actually based on our level of science?

No, when you come down to it, the growth of the fetus is such a progressive and variable thing, that it is totally unpractical to say “at two months, thirteen days, and seven minutes, this is a person.” At best with this method, you would need to have a medical panel approve each abortion, after evaluating the child’s development.

So we’re back to conception or delivery, as the line of demarcation. Using the moment of delivery as the line has produced such horrors as partial birth abortion, where you have a baby that could be delivered any day stabbed in the head with a sharp instrument. As a line of demarcation, it works from a point of setting up paperwork, but fails rather miserably in dealing with reality.

The truth of the matter is, everyone inherently knows that the moment of conception is a big deal. Pregnancy is a big deal. Ask any mother if they didn’t start learning about their child’s personality from the moment they were pregnant. Ask my wife about what foods she craved that are now my son’s favorites, or about the time we got caught in traffic and he started punching her in the bladder. As a father, I got a deep sense during my wife’s pregnancy that this was a person we were dealing with here. It truly struck me.

“What about women’s rights,” you ask. I am totally for women’s rights. I think they have the right not to be subjected to the devastating trauma of abortion. I feel very strongly that every woman who has had an abortion has been in some sense tricked to hurting themselves very deeply. Society has told them that this is ok, but internally they know that it is not. Studies have shown on numerous occasions that women who have abortions suffer increased rates of mental illness afterwards. http://www.drwalt.com/blog/?p=1003. Once you accept the definition of a person as coming at conception—which I would argue is the only logical place to call it—this becomes an argument about one person having rights over another. Once you allow that, you open up a huge Pandora’s box.

Actually, if you look at the science of things, abortion amounts to granting one person the right to kill another outside the context of war or self defense—and by self defense I mean that the preservation of life is at stake, as most abortions are not performed in his circumstance. Again, science and medicine have developed to the point where a necessary abortion is an extreme rarity.

I do not with to minimize the hardship of an unwanted pregnancy. I do believe that a mother who endures the pregnancy, even if it results in a child being given up for adoption, will endure less suffering than a mother who aborts her child. Every person hold vast potential. And now matter how many logical structures we build up, Reality beats them down and presents itself—the result is an enduring pain.

To be pro-choice, you’ve got to be willing to say, “The child’s entire life is not more important than the mother’s wishes.” The mother has to truly believe this in her heart to survive the abortion unscathed. Even if you believe the first statement, statistics have shown the latter doesn’t happen frequently enough to allow the process to continue.

- Vincent J. Shuta Jr.
http://www.shutamultimedia.com
http://www.shuta.com