by DAVID BROWN | CLEARNFO.com | February 02, 2012
Choice or Baby?
If you are religious, you can find many persuasive arguments against abortion from the pulpit; but if you are not religious, these arguments are unimpressive, unconvincing and annoying. If you believe that there is no creator, and that we are just the end result of eons of random successful genetic mutations originating from a primordial soup, the idea of a fetus being just a blob of cells like your liver or spleen– to be removed at will when necessary or convenient– is intellectually reasonable if not entirely emotionally satisfying. The non-religious would naturally wonder what the big fuss is all about and rightfully feel these religious nuts are encroaching on “my reproductive rights!” Amazingly, however, faith has found a place in the hearts of the faithless…once the fetus is beyond the birth canal, umbilical cord cut and fetus viable; it somehow magically attains full rights of an individual human being and is so named. This is part of a long list of “well-established” facts that comprise the credo of the secular world. They reason that perhaps life may begin a bit earlier than this, but not by much. To make things more confusing, we are told that no one really knows when life begins anyway; so we can now use this fuzzy construct to smudge any clear demarcation and add confusion to the ill-trained mind.
What kind of barbarian would deny a woman the right to control her own body or her right to practice birth control as she sees fit? And what about rape, incest and the mother’s life or the quality of life of the infant due to poverty, genetic irregularities, malformations or congenital maladies? Or you wanted a boy and not a girl or it’s just not convenient just now. Surely you must see the logic of allowing women to abort their fetuses? And, to combat the religious nuts, there are websites dedicated to proving that abortion is biblical just in case you are not so sure about all this Deity stuff. So what’s the big deal? The non-believer has every angle covered. It’s just a medical procedure performed by a doctor and his patient.
So, if we are to make any headway on this debate, we have two choices: we can convert everyone on the planet to agree with our particular religious views—unlikely– or we can take a logical, scientific view upon which believers and non-believers can agree.
So what is a fetus? Is it a blob of cells? Yes and no. Is it a weed or a flower, trash or treasure? A series of electrochemical reactions or a blessing? I think we can agree that the term fetus is a cold, disinterested name given to a very young human. It is not a dog. It is not a cat and it is not a liver or an abscessed tooth to be pulled or a hair or finger nail to be cut. It is something different. It depends on the mother for sustenance but it is not part of the mother and does not share its DNA with any other cell in the mother’s body. Every cell in the Mother’s body has the same DNA as every other cell in the Mother’s body except the fetus or baby which resides within the mother’s womb…there by no fault of its own. Helpless, nature’s most vulnerable. The baby possesses some DNA from the Father and some from the Mother but woven together in a very unique way. No two siblings are exactly alike even identical twins differ in terms of gene expression and space and time…and none possess the same combination of DNA as the Mother.
So I think we can safely say that the fetus is not part of the Mother’s body in any logical since unless you also consider the male’s penis part of the mother’s body during coitus and could be aborted as well if not attached to a legally defined separate human. But such conclusions illustrate the foolishness of the abortionists logic more than my crassness. And we can safely say that the fetus is a young human though we may disagree if it is alive or not. Since we have no good definition of life this can be problematic. Some viruses defy our definition of life by many accounts; however, most of us can tell the difference between a virus and a rock yet we get confused when discussing a fetus.
For the non-believer none of this may matter much anyway since the pain to the little human is short –if at all– and it benefits the greater good of the collective to reduce the population, but you must admit that this is a little more consequential than getting a tooth removed or a haircut and there may be some ethical question about killing an innocent life. And for the agnostic or the ethically challenged… if perchance there is a Creator, I would imagine this creator might be just a little bit pissed at a people who chose of their own free will to pass a law that has resulted in the death of over 50 million of His most innocent ones.
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