Re: New Abortion Quiz

----- Original Message -----
From: "Bill Yates" <billyates@billyates.com>
To: "George Murphy" <gmurphy@raex.com>; <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, October 13, 2004 5:27 PM
Subject: Re: New Abortion Quiz

> George--
>
> Essentially your argument says it's OK to extract stem cells since we
> don't know yet if we're killing one or two or more human beings.
>
> But, I will modify my sdtatement to:
>
> * The fertilized egg is HUMAN, one or more human beings (to account for
> the possibility of multiple births), albeit in a very early stage of
> development.

No, it goes deeper than that. Your original argument seemed plausible
because you apparently could point to a single biological entity which will
unquestionably become a human being and say, because there is a continuous
identity throughout the process, "this is a human being." I think this is
clear from the emphasis you put in your original statement - "a LIVING HUMAN
BEING." As soon as we realize the prossibility of twinning the argument is
no longer this simple. The argument is placed perhaps in even greater doubt
by the possibility of formation of chimeras, the merger of two embryos which
results in an adult who has 2 different somatic DNAs in different parts of
the body. Is such a human being really 2 human beings?

But this is not the only problematic thing about your argument. While
abortion was generally condemned in the Christian tradition until quite
recently, abortion
before "quickening" was not always considered equivalent to murder. In
fact, that equation wasn't made even by the RC church until the 19th
century. And this is not just a matter of tradition: The Bible gives us no
statement to indicate at what age the fetus is to be considered fully human.
(Or if you want to use the oft-cited case of John the Baptist leaping in his
mother's womb we could say it's fully human by six months, which doesn't hep
much with early embryos.)

Then there's the fact that the very early embryo has no brain. That is
relevant because one classic definition of a "person", that of Boethius, is
"an individual substance of a rational nature." Can an organism with no
brain be considered rational? Thus there is some plausibility to the
argument of some bioethicists that we ought to use criteria for "brain
birth" parallel to the now common criteria for brain death.

Furthermore, we now know that a large number - I have seen estimates
considerably higher than 50% - of conceptuses are spontaneously aborted at
such an early stage that the mother is seldom even aware that she was
pregnant. It seems odd to think that Heaven (or Limbo for RCs) is going to
be primarily populated by such human beings.

The value of pre-natal life has already been so devalued by our abortion on
demand culture that I really hesitate to make these arguments in a public
forum, but I think that among Christians we ought to be able to discuss
these matters frankly. I do not think that abortion should be allowed
except in some extreme cases after very early stages of development, and I
realize that allowing embryonic stem cell research is likely to make it even
more difficult to put limitations on abortion in general. But we do have to
recognize that the claim that a fertilized ovum is a fully human person from
conception onward is questionable for several reasons.

Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
Received on Wed Oct 13 20:21:53 2004