When does human life begin?
By Tom Quiner
What a huge question:
When DOES human life begin?
If you get the answer wrong, you run the risk of killing an innocent human being, which for people of conscience is a significant moral concern.
If you’re merely concerned about your own skin, well, you run the risk of committing murder and going to jail if you get the answer wrong. So this question of when human life begins is a question worth pondering.
If a person works in the billion dollar human abortion industry, you’d think they’d have a good, solid response if they’re asked this question. Planned Parenthood’s president, Cecile Richards, was asked this question on Fusion TV’s “America with Jorge Ramos” and stumbled badly:
Ramos: So for you, when does life start? When does a human being become a human being?
Richards: This is a question that I think will be debated through the centuries, and people come down on very different points of view on that –
Ramos: But for you, what’s that point?
Richards: It’s, I mean, I feel like it’s not something that’s part of this conversation.
What the heck is Ms. Richards talking about? That’s the entire conversation. That’s what Mr. Ramos is asking.
Richards: I mean, to me, we work with women – I guess the way I’d really like to um – I think every woman has to make her own decision.
No, that is not true. If a mother says human life doesn’t begin until one year after her daughter is born, that is murder. It is not up to “every woman.”
Richards: What we do at Planned Parenthood is make sure that women have all their options for health care, and that they have the option to have a healthy pregnancy; they have an option to put a child up for adoption if they decide to carry a pregnancy to term; or they have the right to make a decision to terminate a pregnancy.
For the record, Planned Parenthood performs 149 human abortions for every adoption referral.
Ramos: But why would it be so controversial to say — for you to say when you think life starts?
Richards: Yeah. Well, I don’t know that it’s controversial. I don’t know that it’s really relevant to the conversation, but I mean, for me, I’m a mother of three children. Um, for me, life began when I delivered them. They’ve been probably the most important thing in my life ever since. But that was my own personal — that’s my own personal decision.
Let’s be clear: 94% of Planned Parenthood’s revenue comes from the human abortion trade. They do a lot of talkin’ about women’s “reproductive health” while they’re actually doin’ a whole lot of damage to a woman’s guts, her psyche, and her child, who is dismembered and killed.
Let’s be clear: human abortion is always about two people; it CAN’T be a personal decision since the child isn’t allowed to make her own personal decision.
Cecile Richards reveals herself to be shallow, cruel, and profit-oriented.
What she said (about life for her children not beginning until she gave birth to them) is not even coherent. If she expects to be taken seriously with that statement, it raises the question of whether she is competent to drive herself to work in the morning. She wishes it wasn’t part of the conversation because the reality of it interferes with their making a profit via abortion. If it wasn’t a life when you were pregnant with each of your children, then you didn’t need pre-natal care, Cecile. If it isn’t a life, then you’re not pregnant.
The life began when they were born? That’s amazing. If she lost the pregnancy a week before her due date, she wouldn’t have said her baby died? That’s such a lie.
Dishonesty is the essence of the human abortion trade.
“Let’s be clear: human abortion is always about two people; it CAN’T be a personal decision since the child isn’t allowed to make her own personal decision.”
You bring up an excellent point here. The fetus (not a ‘child’, any more than it is a teenager or an adult) doesn’t have any conscious thought, awareness or the ability to make a decision. As it can’t make a decision, and this is about two living organisms (not people, let’s get our terminology correct), then the mother, as the conscious one, has to make the decision for the fetus. We have to trust that women can make their own decisions about what quality of life a potential child would have had, and what effect a gruelling unwanted pregnancy would have on her personally.
If we can ensure provision of better education (all-round including sex, respect and logic) for both sexes so that the numbers of unwanted pregnancies decline, then all the better. But in the meantime, attempting to close down places where women can have safe and legal abortions will only encourage later stage abortions and even may lead to a flourishing unregulated abortion trade, which would be in no-one’s best interests. Or would you prefer that?
The fetus IS a child. How do you know it doesn’t have any conscious thoughts? Brain waves begin around the 6th week of pregnancy. The fetus is human. Prove that it is not. It’s DNA verifies that it is indeed human. It is living, as it exhibits the signs of life, i.e. it grows, it uses energy, it is made up of cells, its cells are organized, it responds to its surroundings. The only sign of life that it does NOT demonstrate is reproduction, but a 3 year old cannot reproduce either, and is very much a life.
So, by its DNA, it is human. It demonstrates that it is a life according to the above. If it is human AND is a life, then it is a HUMAN LIFE.
I have no problem with the legal and medical definition. A fetus becomes a baby when it becomes viable. Medical science (based on evolution and all that “science-y’ stuff) has increased viability considerably in the last few decades.
70% of fertilized human cells don’t ever make it past the 1st trimester. 50% of fertilized cells don’t implant to the womb – which is the medical definition of when pregnancy starts. Not much of an intelligent design unless there is some purpose in those 70% not getting to develop into human babies. Spontaneous abortions (miscarriages) far outnumber the human-induced abortions.
The problem with that, Joe, is that viability is happening sooner and sooner within pregnancy. The earliest so far that I could find with a quick google search is 21 weeks, 5 days. Abortion right now in most states is legal through the 2nd trimester which is 26 weeks. Do you see the problem now?
By the way, according to the Mayo Clinic, about 10 to 20% of pregnancies end in miscarriages. In America, about 21 percent of pregnancies end in abortion. So, no, spontaneous abortions do not far outnumber those that are human-induced. And an “accidental death” is clearly less offensive than an intentional ending of life.
Abortion clinics are like Mad Max’s Thunderdome: “Two people enter, one person leaves.”
When is the last time that you heard a woman who is pregnant say that she is “with fetus” or “with an unviable tissue mass”? She is “with child”.