Abortion … what an ugly subject.  If you believe the news media, we have become so polarized on this subject that civil discussion is no longer possible.  But let’s give it a try.

When I was in high school 50 years ago, I doubt that I had heard the word.  When I was in college, I was vaguely for making it legal as I had heard stories about the horrors of “back-room abortions.”  I say “vaguely” because I didn’t know of anyone who had had an abortion and knew only one couple who had to get married after high school because of a pregnancy.  Abortion was a theoretical concept.

In graduate school, things changed.  A fellow graduate student told me that she had had an abortion.  I don’t know if it was prior to college, during college, or just prior to graduate school.  However, she was bright, very bright, and she wanted to be a scientist.  You have heard about the scarcity of females in advanced sciences now.  You can envision how difficult it was then.  I imagine that she was facing the death of her dreams along with the stigma of people discovering that she was pregnant.  Abortion seemed the only choice.  Clearly, the operation was a success, as she was still alive.

However, the operation was a success, but the patient … was left wracked with guilt and emotional problems.

Is Human Life Sacred?

First, what do we mean when we say something is sacred?  My Webster’s dictionary (7^th New Collegiate) gives four definitions for “sacred,” two of which are paired:

• 1a “set apart for the service or worship of deity,”

• 1b “devoted exclusively to one service or use (as of a person or purpose),”

• 2a “worthy of religious veneration : HOLY,”

• 2b “entitled to reverence,”

• 3 “of or relating to religion : RELIGIOUS,” and

• 4 (obsolete) “: ACCURSED.” 

Definitions 1 and 2 are adequate for this discussion, being closer to the common usage when someone claims that human life is sacred, with definition 2 being the closest.  The “a” definitions connect to religion and the “b” definitions do not presuppose a religious connection (using “reverence” to mean “honor” or “respect”).  The point is that an atheist could honestly say that human life is sacred, while meaning something similar, but (perhaps profoundly) different from the understanding of a Christian saying the same thing.

The difference in the meaning of human life being sacred can be seen in the possible origins of the belief that human life is sacred. 

• The origin might be in a personal belief that one’s own life is very important and that others are likely to feel that way toward their lives:  if these individual beliefs were to be expressed mutually, all would feel safer about the preservation of their own lives.  Such a mutual reverence for human life would, of necessity, be a cultural ethic – that is, local in space and time.  A cultural ethic could be shared by all humans (currently regarded as universal) or it might have different values in different areas of the world or among different groups of people in one area and might have different values across time.  A cultural ethic will change as the opinions of people change.

• The origin might be religious, yet not absolute.  For example, a religion that believes in reincarnation might honor or respect human life but not believe that killing a person would be doing irreparable harm.  With no reincarnation, a person might go to hell if killed before he had the chance to repent his sins.  However, with reincarnation, that same person might be reincarnated (perhaps as an inferior being) and have another chance at perfecting his life and eventually achieving “heaven.”  This might be similar to the sports saying, “no harm, no foul.”  Depending on the religion, this belief might be considered universal, invariant over space and time.  That is, its truth is independent of the opinions of people.

• The origin might be religious and absolute.  For instance, if the speaker believes that God created the world and created man in his image, breathed his own life into each person, and loves and values each individual human being, then human life is sacred because God made it so.  This statement that human life is sacred is a universal statement.

Clearly, in this world there is no rule that says that everyone must mean the same thing in saying that human life is sacred.  In fact, there is no rule saying that everyone must believe that human life is sacred in any sense!  Further, there is no rule saying that everyone must act consistently with what they say they believe – counterexamples exist in abundance.

Suppose one believes that human life is sacred using the meaning in the last example – absolute and universal.  How should one act?  And what is “human life”?  The first question can be divided into many questions; however, two questions are currently much debated:  can capital punishment be right and can abortion be right.  We will skip former and concentrate on the latter. 

Part of the abortion discussion depends on the question of what is “human life.”

Biology Tells Us Something about Human Life.

We start as a fertilized egg (zygote), which divides into a multicellular embryo, which differentiates into a fetus.  Then we are born.

A human zygote is alive, by all definitions of life.  It can die or develop.  It will not develop into any being other than a human being.  Further, from the time of conception, this living being is genetically unique, with the exception of those that will become identical twins, triplets, etc.  Even genetically identical individuals experience differences in external influences that will differentiate the individuals.  In particular, these stages of human development represent living beings who are different from the mother.  While they live within the mother, they are not part of the mother’s body.

A wart is part of a person’s body.  It grows as a part of the body and has the genetic structure of that body.  A cancer is part of a person’s body.  It grows as a part of the body, but its genetic structure is a mutated form of that body.  Neither the wart nor the cancer is a separate living being apart from the body.  Removing either is properly a decision of the person upon whose body the wart or the cancer is growing.

A tapeworm or other parasite can grow within a person’s body.  The parasite is a separate living being from the body, growing by using the substance of the body.  The parasite is the proper analog to a growing embryo or fetus living within the mother’s body.  The difference is that the parasite will never, under any circumstance, develop into a human being.

Law and Science Tell Us More about Human Life.

Current law regarding abortion seems to be based on viability.  That is, if the fetus is removed from the mother’s body, can it survive and grow into a human child?  Note, that this does not mean survive and grow on its own.  In fact, no newly born child can survive and grow on its own.  It is incapable of obtaining sustenance or of caring for itself.  Prematurely born children require heroic measures of care to survive and grow.

The age at which a fetus becomes viable is not a scientifically defined number.  It depends on the health of the mother, the available biomedical and technology capacities, and other factors.  Currently in the US, almost all babies born with a gestational age of more than 34 weeks survive.  About 90% survive at 26 weeks (beginning of the third trimester), 50% survive at 24 weeks and virtually none survive below 22 weeks.

The original Roe v. Wade decision tied the states’ right to regulate abortions to the third trimester of pregnancy.  Later, this was amended to state that a person has a right to abortion until viability, usually placed at 28 weeks, but possibly occurring earlier, even at 24 weeks.

Since killing a person is a strongly regulated process, logic indicates that these rulings define a fetus as not being a person until viability is reached.  The problem with this definition is that science is not fixed.  Consider some country with lower biomedical and technology capacities, perhaps with a 50% survival rate at 28 weeks and a 90% survival rate at 30 weeks.  This logic would say that there are fetuses that would be defined as persons in the US, but not in this hypothetical country.  On the other hand, we expect that biomedical and technology capacities will continue to improve.  It requires no stretch of the imagination to believe that the gestational age of viability can be reduced by a week.  In fact, there is no current scientific theory precluding the eventual capability to ensure the survival with complete human capacities of an embryo carried to term in some mechanical womb.  In the future we may discover that this is impossible, but we do not now know that to be the case.  If it is in fact possible, however, we would find that all embryos are persons in that future.  Just because we cannot do this now, does this justify denying the personhood of fetuses now?

What is a human being?

Look around you and try to define what a human being is.  You might begin by describing physical attributes:  a head, a torso, two arms, and two legs.  Clearly that is not sufficient, as clothing store dummies have those – so you add that a human being must be a living being.  You could add details, such as eyes, nose, mouth, etc.  However, you would notice that men and women are different; so you would have to allow some variation for that.  Then you would have to allow for different eye, hair and skin color, etc.  Before you go further, you would have to consider people who have lost a limb or other body part.  Are they still “human”?  How about people who were born with defective limbs?  Remember the Thalidomide babies?

If you try to use capabilities to define a human being, you run into the variations of intellect.  Would you include someone with an IQ of 200+ as truly human?  Would you include someone with an IQ of only 60 or 40 or … ?  If you consider learned capabilities you run into the problem of children and senile adults.  Do you want to exclude them from your definition of “human”?

In this process, you will find that the only commonality is a genetic description, with some (at present unknown) variability.  A human being is a being who is born from human beings.  You are left with that zygote as meeting the definition.

What Is the Christian definition of personhood?

God made Adam and breathed life into him and we all descended from him.  Whether you take this literally or metaphorically, the meaning is simple.  We are made from common elements and have our life from God.

As Christians, we believe we have souls.  We are not sure exactly what they are; however, they are intimately connected with being alive and human.  “Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray thee Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray thee Lord my soul to take.”

A human being, a person, is a being with a soul given by God.  If God told us, “I ensoul the fetus at 24 weeks gestational age,” then we would know exactly when the fetus becomes a person.  Absent such a declaration, is it not wiser to assume personhood at the earliest stage?

There are Special Circumstances that Are Raised Concerning Abortion.

Any discussion of abortion today is going to face the question, “What about to save the life of the mother or in cases of rape or incest?”

Suppose you have conjoined twins, linked only by a patch of skin at the hips.  Each of the pair is a separate person, yet physically they appear to be one entity.  A simple surgery can separate the pair, with no harm to either, yielding two clearly separate persons.

Now, suppose the twins are more intimately linked, sharing a single liver (and some skin, muscle and bone).  In this case, a more complex surgery is possible.  The liver can be divided and each half will regrow to full size.  The bone, muscle and skin can also be separated and, with some reconstruction, will yield functional parts for each twin.  The surgery is riskier – one or both twin might die or be incapacitated.  But success will lead to two separate individuals.

However, there are cases in which one twin is certain to die; the shared organs are not separable.  Sometimes they will both die if the surgery is not attempted.  The risk is that they will both die even if the surgery is attempted.  In such a case, the surgery will be performed to save the life of one, even though it is known that the other will die.

This last case is the proper analog to abortion with the purpose of saving the life of the mother.  Avoiding stigma or the death (or restructuring) of dreams is not the same as saving the life of the mother.  If this last case of separating conjoined twins is legal and moral, how can the analog be otherwise?

Incest is sexual intercourse between closely related people.  The crime of incest depends on the legally prohibited degree of consanguinity or affinity (e.g., step-siblings).  Biologically, children of parents with close genetic relationships are more likely to have genetically related diseases due to inbreeding.  However, these same genetically related diseases are possible for any child, as the parents may both have the same recessive gene despite being not closely related.  Further, as any animal breeder knows, inbreeding does not always cause problems, especially in the first instance.  Are we then supposed to abort any child who might have a genetically related disease?  A 60 Minutes show had doctors who clearly advocated this position.  They were disposing of embryos who had two pairs of an unwanted gene and retaining those who did not.  I cannot agree with this.

Rape is an abhorrent crime.  However, the child of rape was not responsible for the rape.  Does the rapist carry genes that made him a rapist?  Are these genes being passed to the child, influencing him to become a monster?  To be honest, we don’t know.  Can we pass the death sentence on someone who has not committed a crime, even if he might sometime in the future?

Admittedly, the child of rape will be a reminder to the mother of the crime committed against her.  It seems to me that adoption is a better remedy than abortion.

What Can We Conclude?

Both science and Christianity advise us that we do not know that the zygote is not a human being, a person.  The conservative stance, therefore, is to assume personhood and act accordingly.  If we believe human life to be sacred, holy, then abortion should not be considered lightly.  For me, I find that abortion is justified only when it is required to truly save the life of the mother.

If you disagree with my conclusion, it may be that we disagree on one or more of the assumptions.  Or you may disagree with my logic.  In any case, we may continue as friends.  Remember, I have a different opinion now than I had initially.  I would say that my opinion has “evolved.”  However, that is a loaded term, implying improvement over time.  Let us just say that my opinion has changed incrementally over time.

This Is Personal.

Remember the graduate student I mentioned at the beginning – the one who had had an abortion?  For her and for many others like her, abortion is not a theoretical issue, but a personal issue.  It belongs to their past – and their present.  By my conclusion, they have sinned.

You have a right to ask me if I condemn them.  My response is that I recall Jesus’ words, “He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.”  I cannot throw any stones.  We are all God’s children and he loves each and every one of us.  And I remember John 3:17, “For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.”

Thank you for listening. 

I hope that you will think about what I have said.  If you have found it disturbing, please pray on it.