The answer to ‘When does life begin?’ is well-established, not based on religion but on biological science.
The answer to ‘When does life begin?’ is well-established, not based on religion but on biological science.
M y mom is a devout Southern Baptist Christian. Her son grew up to be an award-winning stem-cell biologist. Our understanding of scientific facts and our personal religious beliefs are not in conflict, yet during the public debates on human-embryonic-stem-cell research in the 2000s, the fact that my father was a Baptist minister made some people think they could just dismiss anything I had to say about when a human life begins.
More than 20 years later, similarly baseless arguments are cropping up in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. Late last month, Jefferson circuit-court judge Mitch Perry granted EMW Women’s Surgical Center and Planned Parenthood a temporary injunction blocking Kentucky’s legal ban on most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. (The law allows for pregnancy terminations beyond the six-week cutoff when they are required to save the life of the mother.) As a basis for his ruling, which was overturned by a Kentucky appeals court on Monday, Judge Perry wrote that the state’s argument that life begins at the very moment of fertilization is “a distinctly Christian and Catholic belief.”
My mom and I are both shaking our heads.
Judge Perry, or at least his law clerks, must have an understanding of basic human biology. Type “When does human life begin?” into Google, and the first result that comes up is “fertilization.” That Catholics and other Christians believe that a human life begins at conception does not invalidate the independent scientific knowledge of human life. Judge Perry’s ruling attempted to restore the now-exposed ruse of Roe, which put the question “When does life begin?” at the center of the abortion debate, even though the answer was already clear at the time. This question strategy was a maneuver that allowed the Court to have to address only two legal parties, the state and the pregnant woman, instead of three. The third party, the unborn child, was swept underneath a rug of sociology, philosophy, and even theology.
The Roe justices also swept the science of their day under that rug by ignoring it altogether. In 1973, biomedical scientists had been performing in vitro fertilization with the sperm and eggs of animals for more than a decade. Isolated sperm would fertilize isolated eggs in a test tube (in vitro); after implantation into the uterus of a recipient animal, the fertilized egg would grow up to become a baby animal. So it was already established scientific knowledge that the life of animals began with conception, which is the fertilization of an egg. Did the Roe court really have to wait for Louise Joy Brown’s birth by in vitrofertilization, in 1978, to know that human lives also begin at fertilization? Of course not.
Dobbs affirmed in the law what was already established in science. The answer to “When does life begin?” is well established, not based on religion but on biological science. Dobbs affirms that all human beings, born and unborn, have the same constitutional right to life. So although EMW Women’s Surgical Center and Planned Parenthood briefly enjoyed Judge Perry’s stay of their closure, and will undoubtedly appeal in an attempt to get the stay reinstated, the state of Kentucky should ultimately prevail on the legal merits.
Religious people get to cite science, too. My mom holds fast to her belief that a higher power decides when new souls come into the world. But that belief does not invalidate her scientific understanding of how her children were conceived — she knows that I was a living human being in the moment when one of my father’s sperm fertilized one of her eggs. That is not religion. That is science.
Kentucky’s six-week limit on abortion is one of many post-Dobbs first steps taken by states around the country to increase America’s respect for and protection of human lives. Roe and Dobbs have already taught us that it will take more than religion and science to make us a nation whose Constitution protects the right to life of all human beings. But one day, we will arrive in that new nation where we do not abort our children, and that will be a better nation for everyone.