Pro-Lifers….you’ve got to stop using the argument, “It’s life, so therefore it’s murder.”  It’s falling on deaf ears!  The real question is, “What makes a person?” And that question, right there, is the best one to ask in an abortion discussion.  Because guess what?  No one really knows the answer.  And that’s dangerous.

Guess what?  This generation, everybody knows that a fetus is a human life.  Pro-Lifers need to stop thinking it’s a convincing argument against abortion.

Pro-choice advocates no longer try to convince people that a fetus is just a blob of tissue.  3-D ultrasounds fixed that notion long ago.  Maybe there’s some uneducated 15-year-old girl out there who still thinks that, but not the abortion advocates.

Science has proven that life begins at conception.  It’s not contested anymore.

The real question at stake today is whether the unborn child is a person.  This is where the real debate begins.  

“‘The question is not really about life in any biological sense,’ intones Yale professor Paul Bloom….’It is instead asking about the magical moment at which a cluster of cells becomes more than a mere physical thing.'” (***see below for source of this and all further quotations)

“Princeton ethicist Peter Singer acknowledges that ‘the life of a human begins at conception.’  But ‘the life of a person–a being with some level of self-awareness–does not begin so early.'”

If our universe has materialistic origins, then the human body is nothing more than a disposable, yet complex machine, and our personhood is a mysterious entity that is separate from the body.  This split worldview began in the Enlightenment and has been subconsciously absorbed by most westerners.  Our biological body can be manipulated like any other machine to match up with our unseen person.  Just because a human is alive doesn’t mean he’s a person.  Thus, the pregnant woman, an established person, should not have to sacrifice her well-being for the sake of a non-person, the fetus.

Ask the Right Question

Pro-Lifers….you’ve got to stop using the argument, “It’s life, so therefore it’s murder.”  It’s falling on deaf ears!  The real question is, “What makes a person?”

And that question, right there, is the best one to ask in an abortion discussion.  Because guess what?  No one really knows the answer.  And that’s dangerous.  “Once personhood is separated from biology, no one can agree how to define it.”  It won’t just stop at unborn children.

“James Watson, co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, recommended waiting until after birth [to call a baby a person] and giving a newborn baby three days of genetic testing before deciding whether it should be allowed to live.  For Singer, personhood remains a ‘gray’ area even at three years of age.”

If an unborn baby is not a person, then what about anyone who is a burden on society?  What about children born with disabilities?  What about terminally ill people?  What about mentally ill people?  What about the poor?  What about the elderly?  Who gets to decide who is a person with a right to life?

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