HHS accomplishes its mission through programs and initiatives that cover a wide spectrum of activities, serving and protecting Americans at every stage of life, beginning at conception.The author of the Federalist article, Heather Prude, interprets this to mean that HHS affirms that life begins at conception, but whether that's the intent of the drafters of the document or not, that's not what the above passage says. The construction of the sentence is such that it clearly affirms that protection of life will begin at conception.
This is an important distinction because too often the debate over abortion has been muddied over fruitless disagreements about "when life begins," and the concept of a person is confused with the concept of a living entity. The fact is, life is a continuum. It doesn't begin with conception, much less birth.
The gametes produced in the bodies of one's parents are living cells. One's parents are themselves living organisms when they produce those cells. The gametes fuse at conception to produce a living conceptus, which develops into a living embryo, fetus, and ultimately a newborn. There is no stage along the way at which life "begins."
The phrase itself makes no sense biologically since, whether one takes the view of a naturalist or of a theist, life had a single, unique beginning in some event in the remote past and has been unbroken and continuous in leading to each one of us ever since.
The real question is not when life begins, but at what point does a living entity become a legal person subject to all the rights and protections of the law, including the right to life? The HHS document establishes that it will be government policy to assume that the onset of personhood occurs at conception. Prude writes:
The debate over the personhood of unborn children has been a central issue of the abortion debate. Ever since Roe v. Wade in 1973, pro-life advocates have been trying to establish constitutionally protected rights for the unborn. In the ruling’s majority opinion, Justice Harry Blackmun wrote that Roe v. Wade would collapse if “the fetus is a person.”Modern abortion jurisprudence has unfortunately declared personhood to be a de facto consequence of birth. An individual becomes a person when he or she is born and lacks the right to life prior to that. At least half the country thinks that's a philosophically and biologically indefensible position, and now the HHS for the first time in many decades seems to agree with them.
The document is still a draft and is open to public comment for two more weeks. If it's approved, it will supplant the Obama administration’s previous five-year plan.
