Most people agree a person’s liberty ends where another’s rights begin (e.g., you can wave your hands around freely until you infringe on someone else’s right to not be assaulted by your hands). Therefore, the fundamental question underlying the entire abortion issue is at what point, from single cell being until death, is a human being considered a person with all the natural (and legal) rights that confers? After all, “my body, my choice” is irrelevant if it is someone else’s body.
Unsurprisingly, people’s opinions vary on where life begins ranging from the moment of conception to after the baby passes through the birth canal. This factor plays a crucial role in determining where to draw the line at how late into a pregnancy an abortion is morally acceptable. The below stages are common delimiters used to determine where human life begins.
Moment of conception (zero weeks). It’s probably fair to say the majority of pro-life advocates contend life begins at the moment of conception (fertilization). This is the stage when “the human being emerges as a whole, genetically distinct individuated zygotic living human organism… needing only the proper environment to grow and develop” according to the American College of Pediatricians (ACP). Despite some claims to the contrary, this premise is corroborated in scores of medical, philosophical, and religious literature as well as by nearly all human embryologists. Medically speaking, life begins at conception.
Considering the political division on the issue, it is clear science is not the arbiter for self-proclaimed “trust the science” pro-choice advocates. Rather, “life” is a philosophical question of when personhood, humanity, value, et al. is conferred upon the human life (medically speaking) inside a mother’s womb. The ACP provides a succinct answer on this too, the “individual in its adult stage and in its zygotic stage is one of form, not nature”. In other words, human life is just that whether it is in the womb or outside it, fully formed or still developing. This appears to make logical sense as humans, whether 5 or 70, are constantly changing and developing, albeit at different rates, over the course of a lifetime.
At conception, a genetic sequence already exists determining a person’s height, eye and hair color, genetic predispositions to allergens, cognitive ability, and all other characteristics that make humans individuals. In the absence of either intentional (abortion) or unintentional (e.g., miscarriage) adverse factors, the baby will be born into the world.
Once baby has a heartbeat (~6 weeks). A baby’s heartbeat is typically detected by week six of a pregnancy, though at least one study suggests a heartbeat could be detectable as early as 16 days post-conception. However, using this delimiter as a litmus test for determining human life doesn’t pass even a basic sniff test.
If having a heartbeat alone determined what constituted human life, CPR and other life-saving medical assistance wouldn’t be rendered to patients whose hearts stop beating as they would no longer be considered human or valuable. To do so would be a waste of resources considering they could be put to better use on patients still deemed human (having beating hearts). Some distinguish the detected “heartbeat” at six weeks as not constituting an actual heartbeat as it is “a group of cells with electrical activity”, not a mature cardiovascular system. Using this logic, patients reliant on a pacemaker to send electrical signals and produce an artificial heartbeat would also be classified as inhuman. Are these people less valuable to the world because they cannot regulate their heart independently?
Fortunately, it is highly unlikely any serious person would consider patients in either scenario as lacking human life. Why else would people be concerned about resuscitating flatlined patients whether in-person or on a TV medical drama? It then follows there must be another factor at play in determining the value of life besides the mere presence of a heartbeat.
Still, pro-choice advocates criticize ‘heartbeat bills’, legislation designed to ban abortion past six weeks (often with minimal exceptions), as “draconian” and “anti-science”. Texas joined Georgia and Ohio to become the latest state to pass a heartbeat bill, even carving out exceptions when medically necessary. In opposing this bill, pro-choice advocates latched onto a new claim stating the bill doesn’t allow women enough time to identify and abort a pregnancy. This claim is based on the notion women don’t often find out they are pregnant until week four and are then left with only two weeks to abort under Texas’s law. According to the American Pregnancy Association (APA), most women discover they are pregnant between four and seven weeks, suggesting this claim is actually a conservative estimate. Although this argument appears to imply an abortion ban would be acceptable if women had more time to identify and seek abortion, it is almost invariably the case this would be unacceptable to pro-choice advocates.
Abortion data published by the CDC suggests most women who get abortions are not only aware of but also abort pregnancy at or before six weeks—78% of women who aborted pregnancies in 2018 did so at or before nine weeks. Although the CDC does not provide abortion data for aborted pregnancies at or before six weeks, it is very likely the majority of aborted pregnancies occurred by that time given medical advancement to detect pregnancy at earlier stages and the trend of women aborting pregnancies at increasingly earlier stages. This claim is also supported when observing data dating back to 2009, in which the CDC noted a “shift occur[ing] toward earlier gestational ages, with the percentage of abortions performed at ≤6 weeks’ gestation increasing 8%”.
So why is it that most women have no trouble identifying not only their pregnancy, but successfully aborting it at or before six weeks (or very soon after)? Answer: Most women are competent and can follow basic medical recommendations for sexually active women such as taking a pregnancy test each month at the expected onset of their period.
Viability outside the womb (~24 weeks). Note: Abortion “rights” established by Roe v Wade end at viability, and only then are due to medical necessity. Babies are typically viable outside the womb sometime around 24 weeks, although most state-of-the-art neonatal intensive care units (NICUs)allow possibility of survival for babies born as early as 22 weeks. This argument rests on the idea a “fetus” is human only once it is developed enough to survive outside the womb (assuming no complicating medical issues). As “viability” is generally the next stage pro-choice advocates argue as the delimiter for the beginning of human life, it is crucial to define the term. Multiple definitions exist such as “capable of living, developing, or germinating under favorable conditions” which would confirm viability at conception. This section will discuss viability using a more relevant alternative with regard to abortion, “capable of living outside the uterus”.
An inviable baby relies on resources provided by the mother’s body for survival much the same way an adult relies on kidney dialysis or other medical technology to make up for a body’s functional deficiencies. A pro-choice advocate might differentiate between an inviable baby and the adult as the adult very likely had functionality and lost it as opposed to the baby whose functions have yet to exist. However, this does not account for the roughly 2% of infants born with birth defects and other maladies rendering a baby inviable. The only physical difference between an inviable baby relying on the nutrients and environment of a mother’s uterus and an adult requiring medical assistance for survival—specifically one born with a birth defect, never being functionally independent even a first time—is the location of the baby inside the mother. Since many people would be against the eugenic policy of killing babies born with birth defects as opposed to providing medical assistance, the viability argument really amounts to “is it possible for the baby to survive being born?” The answer to this question is determined by multiple factors including time, socioeconomic status, and geography.
Time. More babies survive childbirth today than during any other era in history due to advances in medical technology. Today, this technology gives babies not considered viable just 50 or 100 years ago, let alone centuries ago, a real chance at survival at increasingly earlier gestational ages. According to the CDC, early fetal mortality rate, defined as the number of fetal deaths at 20–27 weeks of gestation per 1,000 live births, decreased 6% between 2000-2006; the trend has almost certainly continued. Though not as directly relevant to the stage of viability, the world has also experienced a significant decrease in infant mortality rates since the introduction of modern medicine. With this in mind, claiming viability as the start of personhood is to claim a 24-week-old baby today as human but not the same baby at a time in history lacking today’s medical technology. This is despite no inherent difference between any two such babies in terms of development and inherent value. A baby born today is not more intrinsically valuable than a baby born in 1950 or 1200 though this is the logical conclusion of the viability argument.
Socioeconomic status. Given viability differs based on available medical knowledge and technology, one must consider other factors determining availability of that technology. One of the most obvious factors is socioeconomic status. The baby of a mother who can afford an advanced NICU is de jure viable at at least 22 weeks while the baby of a poor mother with access to basic NICU services only reaches de jure viability at 24 weeks. This amounts to a two-week period during which the rich mother’s baby has human rights while the poor woman’s baby doesn’t. This legally classifies killing the rich mother’s baby as murder two weeks prior to the poor mother’s whose abortion is just another exercise of the presumed “right to choose”. Logically, this means a rich woman’s baby is more valuable than a poor woman’s baby (or at the very least obtains human rights first), but most would be hard pressed to morally defend such a position.
It is no secret other factors play a role in the health of a pregnancy such as smoking, drinking, anesthetic gases, video display terminals, exposure to stress, radiation, lead, pesticides, air pollution, organic solvents, and exposure to some metals. Additionally, socioeconomics are linked to other relevant factors such as the mother’s nutrition, education, and access to neonatal care that can play a significant role in the health of a pregnancy.
These factors also impact the circumstances in which a child might be raised, a eugenic argument often used to justify abortion to protect a child from adverse health or environmental conditions. From an environmental standpoint, some argue a child born to a poor mother or family or in a bad neighborhood will suffer more than if it had been aborted. However, this ignores the concept of income mobility as the vast majority of people in the bottom fifth of income earners rise out of it in about a decade (i.e., the child is highly unlikely to live in poverty for its entire childhood). It also dismisses the greatness of individuals who have overcome adversity to become some of the most highly successful and influential humans on earth (e.g., David Goggins, Inky Johnson, Eminem).
The eugenic argument is made by those with the hubris to seek their own vision of cosmic justice, claiming to know which people should live or die to most benefit society—an arbitrary set of factors subject to change based on who’s in charge at any given time. In fact, this is how Planned Parenthood (PP) was founded. PP’s eugenicist founder, Margaret Sanger, even placed her PP clinics in majority black neighborhoods to advance her Negro Project, designed to curb the growth of the black population.
Today, arbitrary lines are drawn as to which babies will benefit society most based on genetic conditions such as race or maladies like spina bifida or down syndrome and the perceived value of a baby’s life in less-than-ideal environments. Even the pro-choice argument women “don’t just decide one day at eight months pregnant to get an abortion” tacitly supports eugenic arguments since that is the de facto reason for such abortions given they are rarely medically necessary.
Geography. Access to advanced care—and therefore better medical outcomes—also varies geographically, conferring human rights at an earlier stage to babies in cities, counties, and countries with advanced medical technology than to those who aren’t (assuming the viability argument). Using the same logic as the above, most would be hard pressed to morally defend the claim a mother’s baby in rural Africa is less valuable than a mother’s baby in the US, all things equal. Even within the US, viability claims a 23-week-old baby could be aborted in rural West Virginia lacking advanced NICUs while the same abortion would be considered murder in a rich Chicago suburb—the only difference between the two babies being a physical distance of around 600 miles.
These factors are all capable of altering fetal viability, making it an inconsistent determinant (both legally and morally) of when a woman is merely obtaining an abortion or murdering her baby.
Once baby is born. Some pro-choice advocates believe life begins only once a baby passes through the mother’s birth canal. This includes allowing abortion up to and during childbirth (partial-birth abortion) in which a baby is delivered halfway and killed before it fully emerges from the mother’s vagina.
Proponents of this claim argue abortion should be allowed past the point of viability. Between viability and birth, abortion is often conducted via dilation and evacuation (D&E) methods, a technique that artificially induces labor to dilate the cervix before crushing, dismembering, and removing a baby’s body parts from the woman’s uterus. In some cases a doctor administers a lethal injection to the baby’s heart in utero to ensure the baby does not survive the procedure. It would appear even most women are morally opposed to abortion at this stage considering 92% of women obtain an abortion at or before 13 weeks according to the CDC (approximately 5,300 women aborted pregnancies after week 20 in 2018).
Abortion after viability involves killing an entity (separate from the mother or not) that could survive outside the womb. However, because the baby has not been “officially” born (naturally or C-section) pro-choice advocates presume the baby to be part of women’s bodies, as either some type of appendage, cancer, or parasite. This logic does not hold up to even basic scrutiny:
Past viability, how many brains does the mother have? One or two? How many arms and legs does the mother have? Two or four? It’s highly likely no one would consider a pregnant woman as having two brains and four legs, thus distinguishing between the woman’s body and the baby’s. This alone demonstrates the logical distinction even the most adamant “my body, my choice” zealot makes between mother and child in the womb. This is further enforced by those claiming a baby is kicking or sleeping in the womb as opposed to the mother kicking or sleeping.
Other pro-choice advocates consider a baby to be a parasite worthy of removal. However, this would mean some mothers choose to keep and birth their “parasite” while some seek medical treatment (abortion) for it. The logic falls apart when considering the definition of a parasite as “an organism that lives in or on an organism of another species (its host) and benefits by deriving nutrients at the other's expense”. Not only is there no medical literature in existence referring to babies or fetuses as parasites, there is no case in which a baby lives and grows at the expense of the mother. Even in cases where a continued pregnancy has adverse effects on a mother’s physical health, the impact is almost always due to complications with preexisting conditions or issues developed during pregnancy unrelated to the baby. In other words, a pregnancy by itself—no complications—has no adverse effects on a mother’s health. The argument also misses the mark since the growing life is not “another species”.
In the abstract, most people acknowledge the sanctity of life present inside a pregnant woman while simultaneously advocating to kill that very child. Why else would one of the most-liked Instagram posts of all time be a photo of Beyonce’s pregnancy? Just the thought of someone as iconic as Beyonce creating life and sharing it with the world sent society into an ecstatic uproar, though statistically half of those likes wouldn’t hesitate to celebrate Beyonce killing her five- to nine-month-old twins via abortion.
Furthermore, why would news organizations specify a woman is pregnant when reporting on her murder? If a baby is nothing more than a bunch of cells, cancer, parasite, or otherwise a part of the woman’s body, reporting a woman as pregnant is redundant and serves no meaningful purpose. Rather, “pregnant” is included because it has a significantly different meaning to readers, both emotionally and morally. Even legally, killing a pregnant woman could have more severe penalties than killing a woman who isn’t.
Babies born alive (infanticide). If a heartbeat bill is the pro-life’s form of an extreme abortion law, infanticide is looking at extreme in the rear-view mirror. While some may not vocally support infanticide, more specifically the neglect or outright killing of babies already born alive, all but three Democrat Senators in Congress in 2019 voted ‘Nae’ against banning the practice via the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act. The act “prohibit[s] a health care practitioner from failing to exercise the proper degree of care in the case of a child who survives an abortion or attempted abortion”. This vote proves mainstream Democrat politicians (and any followers supporting the decision) prioritize a mother’s convenience over the life of living, breathing humans. Governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, even went on record regarding “non-viable” babies born alive, “The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother”. In other words, a living baby would be delivered, possibly even using life-saving measures to keep the baby alive, and then discussions would take place as to whether to kill the baby or neglect it until it dies. Pro-choice advocates celebrated the passage of this legislation as well as similarly extreme laws in New York and Colorado.
Other positions that appearing extreme to most have found a wide acceptance in today’s society among pro-choice advocates who celebrate and take pride in aborting babies (e.g., the #shoutyourabortion campaign). One “comedian” went so far as to say “You know how my abortion made me feel? Very powerful. I walked out of there being like…’I am God!’” implying she understood how it felt to take a life. Still others have gone viral on social media for not only celebrating getting an abortion, but mocking others for whom the occasion is a difficult decision. Others have expressed a wish to get pregnant for the sole reason of aborting the baby. In today’s politically correct culture led almost exclusively by the pro-choice mainstream media, it is surprising to see acceptance of such blatant disregard surrounding what is, for many, the difficult decision to abort.
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