The Case for Pro-Life
Part 1 - see Part 2
by Sean McDowell
Imagine you are a pregnant young woman with tuberculosis. The father of
your unborn child is a short-tempered alcoholic with Syphilis, a sexually
transmitted disease. You have already had five kids. One is blind, another
died young, and a third is deaf and unable to speak. The fourth has tuberculosis—the
same disease you have. What would you do in this situation? Should you consider
abortion? If you chose to have the abortion, you would have ended a valuable
human being—regardless of the possible difficulties it may have brought
you. Fortunately, the young woman who was really in this dilemma chose life.
Otherwise we would never have heard the Fifth Symphony by Beethoven, for
this young woman was his mother.
The issue of abortion is very personal to me. My youngest sister, Heather, was adopted into my family when she was just four weeks old. Even though I was only in fourth grade at the time, I will never forget the first time I held her as a newborn baby. Like all newborns, she weighed only a few pounds, and was so precious and innocent. Now she is a beautiful young woman with an incredible heart for children. Her birth-mother was a young, unmarried teenager, totally unprepared to support a newborn. While she could have chosen to have an abortion, our family is so thankful she did the right thing by choosing life. While her pregnancy may have been an inconvenience for her, the birth-mother understood that even an unborn fetus is a valuable human being. It’s difficult for my family to imagine what our lives would be like without the blessing of my sister Heather.
As you read through this chapter please keep one thing in mind: Abortion is not merely an academic issue—it involves every one of us. We can all be thankful that our parents were pro-life, because if they weren’t, none of us would be here.
The Scientific Case
Many people mistakenly believe that abortion is merely a religious or philosophical issue. But this is false. The issue of abortion is primarily a scientific issue, and more specifically an issue of biology. What current scientific data has concluded is unmistakable: Conception marks the beginning of human life. In fact, prior to the Roe vs. Wade court case legalizing abortion in 1973, nearly every medical school book assumed or taught conception as the beginning of human life.1 This fact is so well documented that no intellectually honest and informed scientist can deny it.
The Three Steps of the Scientific Case
Not too long ago I visited a crisis pregnancy center. I took a tour of the facility
while the director showed me the method their staff uses to convince virtually
all pregnant women considering an abortion to give birth. Do you know what method
they use that convinces nearly all women to keep their babies? It is the ultrasound.
As soon as women are able to see a picture of the unborn baby inside them they
immediately realize that it is a precious unborn human being worthy of protection.
But this is a conclusion not reached solely through observation, it is also widely
supported by scientific data.
The scientific case the pro-life position has three key steps.2 The first step involves showing that the unborn is alive. Pro-choice defenders often express skepticism by saying, “No one knows when life begins.” Despite the emotional appeal of this claim, it is simply false. Gregory Koukl observes, “The mother and father are alive. So are the individual sperm and egg. The zygote formed from their union is alive, as is the developing fetus during its entire term. Finally, the child delivered at birth is alive.”3 The unborn responds to stimuli, it grows, and it has a metabolism—all marks of living organisms. There is no stage in the process of development where the unborn is not living.
The second stage of the pro-life argument is to show that the unborn is a separate individual from the mother. Biologically speaking, it is a scientific fact that the mother and fetus are separate organisms. While the baby may be dependent on the mother, it is still a distinct individual. Consider the following evidences:
- Many women carry babies with a different blood type than their own.
- Women may be carrying a male child.
- The fetus has a DNA fingerprint completely distinct from the mother.
- If the embryo of black parents is transplanted into a white mother, she will still have a black baby.
- Early in development the fetus has its own hands, feet, heart, skin, and eyes.
The third stage of the pro-life argument is to show that the individual is human. A simple fact of life is helpful here: beings reproduce after their own kind. Greg Koukl explains this point“…a new being can only come from living parents and these parents reproduce according to their kind. Dogs beget dogs, lizards beget lizards, bacteria beget bacteria, etc.”4
Therefore, if we want to know what type of being an offspring is, we ask a simple question: what type of parents did it have? Since beings reproduce according to their kind, something that is produced through the union of two humans must also be human. DNA also reveals the nature of an organism. If embryos of different animals were lined up in a row, it would be virtually impossible by the naked eye to determine which one was human. But if we could examine its DNA we would know its identity for certain. Each organism has its own DNA fingerprint at the moment of conception.
Therefore, the scientific case for pro-life is based on three facts that are present at the moment of conception: 1) the unborn is living; 2) the unborn is a separate individual from the mother; 3) the unborn is a human being. Skeptics will challenge this case by saying, “Well, the unborn may be a human, but it is not a person.” We will consider this challenge as well as other objections next month in “The Case for Pro-Life, part 2.”
Side Note: Experiencing God’s Forgiveness
Reading this article has probably been quite difficult for some of you. Maybe you feel like this young girl:
I had sex with my boyfriend, thinking I owed it to him. Later, when I learned I was pregnant, he blew up and said I should get an abortion—that it was all my fault. So, to save my parents heartache and to keep Matt, I had an abortion. Now Matt has left me. How can God love me after all I have done? I’m just so confused. Can God really love and forgive me?
So often I hear young people say, “If you only knew what I had done you would know I can’t be forgiven.” My heart breaks when I hear this because I know it’s so far from the truth. God can heal the emotional scars of our past mistakes and restore a person’s hope for a fulfilling life. One young woman put it this way in a letter to Dear Abby:
I was raped by a relative when I was a teenager. I spent the next five years searching desperately for love through numerous brief sexual encounters. I felt cheap and dirty and was convinced that no one could love or want me. Then I met a very special young man who convinced me that God loved me just the way I was, and that I was precious in His sight. I then let go of my burdensome past, and by accepting God’s forgiveness, I started on the long road to forgiving myself. It works. Believe me.5 – Free and Happy
See Part 2 of The Case for Pro-Life.
Sean McDowell’s new book Ethix is designed to help young people and adults build a biblical worldview on major issues such as abortion, drugs and alcohol, sex, homosexuality, marriage and divorce, war, knowing God’s will and more. Ethix has received endorsements from Lee Strobel, Norman Geisler, J.P. Moreland, Josh McDowell, Kerby Anderson, Mark Matlock, and more. It is available at www.planetwisdom.com.
Footnotes:
- Ankerberg & Weldon, The Facts on Abortion, 6-10.
- This three-part argument is developed by Gregory Koukl, Precious Unborn Human Persons (San Pedro, CA: Stand to Reason Press), 16-23.
- Ibid, page 16.
- Ibid, page 22.
- As quoted in Scott B. Rae, Moral Choices (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2000), p. 241.