The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a couple of cases this Fall that will once again bring abortion back into the news. Indeed, one of the cases centers around a Texas law restricting abortion that has already created national controversy.
I thought it appropriate, therefore, to rerun two posts that originally appeared on VP in 2019 that address some of the issues involved in the debate over abortion. The first follows and the second will be up tomorrow:
There are several deeply flawed arguments frequently adduced whenever the topic of abortion is discussed, and several of them popped up the other day on CNN's Primetime with Chris Cuomo show.
CNN contributor and former New York City politician Christine Quinn argued, for instance, that “When a women is pregnant, that is not a human being inside of her. It is part of her body."
This is a stunning assertion. What, exactly, does Ms Quinn think that it is that resides in the mother's womb if not a human being?
The embryo or fetus is most certainly a "being" of some sort, and it is most certainly human. It's surely not a frog or cow embryo that's growing inside the mother's body, nor is it a cyst or tumor.
It has the genetic composition of a human being even if it's not as big as an adult human nor look exactly like an adult human. After all, size and looks are not what makes a human being human. If they were then neither dwarfs nor toddlers would be human beings.
Nor is it part of her body like, say, an appendix is. The developing human being has its own DNA signature, it's own blood type, sex and race, all of which may be different from that of the mother.
If it were just a part of the mother's body why is it, as Chris Cuomo observes, that mothers who abort often agonize over their decision? Do people agonize over whether to destroy a tumor or excise an appendix?
The argument that the unborn child is not human and can therefore be disposed of however the mother wishes is pretty much the same argument that was used to enslave blacks and to exterminate Jews. Once a particular group is dehumanized it's easy to rationalize killing them.
Another claim that often arises in discussions about abortion (though not in the present one) is the contention that "No one knows when life begins." This statement reflects an utter ignorance of biology. Life is a continuum going back to the first living cell, and there's no stage in the procreation process from that first cell to the most recently born child in which there's any doubt about the organisms and cells involved being alive.
Two living adults produce living gametes which fuse to form a living conceptus, which in turn differentiates into a living child. At no point are any of these entities not biologically alive.
Moreover, to insist, as many often do, that a child becomes human at birth is absurd. It's a delusion to think that something magical happens to the fetus as it's being birthed that somehow transforms it from subhuman one moment into a fully human being the very next moment. What, precisely, occurs during the voyage down the birth canal that effectuates this transformation?
Anyway, here's video of the exchange (Well, "exchange" is a bit euphemistic as a description of what follows) between Cuomo, Quinn and their pro-life antagonist, former senator Rick Santorum: