SUNDAY REVELATIONS: ON LIFE
The argument over abortion is based on a combination of ignorance and faith among the pro “lifers.”
They seem to believe that every normal conception will make a baby. This is simply not true.
At MOST 50% of conceptions go on to become a newborn baby. The rest .. with no abortions .. are miscarriages.
The fertilized egg is not a baby. It can no more think or play basketball than a cell from your tonsils can do that. So what is a baby? When do the cells that come from the egg become a person? Obviously the egg or the early embryo is not a person in the sense anyone of us would recognize in a baby. Nor does the appearance of four limbs and a head make a developing embryo, no matter now cute it may appear, a small person.
The idea that the fertilized egg or the ball of cells derived from that egg, called a “blastula,” is a baby is both old and new. The old part goes back before science to biblical days where our ancestors had no idea that cells … much less sperm and eggs … existed. The best they could do was imagine that male ejaculate somehow fertilized the womb. That is why no bible has a prohibition against early term abortions .. they had no idea what an early person would look like!
Then came the microscope and we could see the sperm and the egg. We leaned about DNA and discovered that each person’s genome was encoded by DNA coming 50% from the sperm and 50% from the egg. It seemed natural to imagine that some magical event occurred when the two sets of DNA were in one cell.
That view, though certainly not in the Quran, the Torah, or the Christian bible is not unreasonable. The pro lifers believe in the magic of DNA! For those of us who do not think an egg or a blastula is a person, we see the magic but know that the code only tells the cells how to develop a person. For me, the wonder of the code is not that it is a person, but that the sequence of AGTC can be used to make a person. Indeed toady, we can take that code from an adult cell and make more people. While no one has yet done that with humans, the procedure is well understood for other animals .. creating an obvious moral dilemma for us all.
Back to the lifers, the true answer is that no scientist can answer the question of when a bunch of cells becomes a person any more than we can answer the question of when a stroke patient is so far from being human that we decide to terminate life support. Both answers are matters of faith.
I SUPPORT Bill’s right to believe that the fertilized egg is a baby, as long as his beliefs to do not interfere with the beliefs of anyone else.
Tags: Commentary by SMS, Religion
Posted 02 Oct 2016 by theaveeditor
in Misc.