In a recent article that has to be read to be believed, Shannon Dea, co-president of Planned Parenthood Waterloo Region, responds to a call by a Canadian member of parliament to have a debate on the humanity of the unborn child, saying: “Medical science is irrelevant to the question of when a fetus becomes a human being — that matter is a legal and philosophical one, not a medical one.”
Dea might as well have said that medical science is irrelevant to the question of whether or not a pig is a pig, or an elephant is an elephant, or a tree is a tree, and that the question of whether a pig is really a pig is “a legal and philosophical” one. The fact is that the unborn child, whatever you might say about its right (or lack thereof) not to be ripped into pieces and vacuumed out of its own mother’s womb, is obviously a member of the human species – a living organism with a completely unique human genetic code – and it is obviously science that tell us this.
Any argument that it is the law or philosophy that informs us whether a fetus is human is simply laughable – it is neither the law nor philosophy that classify living organisms according to their proper genus and species based upon their characteristics and genetic makeup. That’s the job of science. Law and philosophy barely enter the equation. And if Dea doesn’t know that, then perhaps it’s time she takes a refresher course in grade 2 biology.
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Notice that Dea’s argument isn’t the old cant of the pro-abortion movement, that the unborn child may be human (as science shows), but that it isn’t a “person” (which is a philosophical question) – she goes even further and states outright that even the humanity of the fetus is up for debate, because it’s a “legal and philosophical” question.
Sadly, I’m not surprised. Abortion supporters have long seemed to believe that there exists some magical force by which an unborn baby may suddenly become a baby, and then in a single instant become an amorphous “blob of tissue” again. They grant this power in particular to the mother of an unborn child: if a mother decides that she “wants” her baby, then…poof!…she has a baby. But if she suddenly decides that she doesn’t “want” the baby…poof!…it’s a blob of tissue, or the “products of conception” again.
It’s all part of the radical doctrine of absolute “self-determination,” the same doctrine that, for instance, allows a clearly male person to announce (and be taken seriously) that he is a “woman,” and vice versa. Advocates of this doctrine are willing even to throw the most basic laws of medical science under the bus if necessary. The only problem is that, when this doctrine is applied to abortion, you’re not giving someone the power to change their gender, you’re giving them the power to decide if someone is human or not…or, in other words, to decide if they should be allowed to live of not. In that case, what’s to stop us from extending this power to mothers beyond the womb, allowing them to decide if they “want” a baby even after birth? That, of course, is exactly the point that Princeton “ethicist” Peter Singer makes, when he argues that parents should have the right to euthanize their child for a certain (and necessarily arbitrary) time after birth.
The fact is, abortion supporters want abortion to be legal, because it’s absolutely necessary to the lifestyles they live and the worldview they espouse. To let go of the “right” to abortion would throw a major kink in their groove, and so they have to manufacture ways to justify the killing of the unborn child, even if science itself needs to be sacrificed on the altar of “choice.” You might remember this appalling video of Planned Parenthood reps telling college students that science is not “absolute truth,” comparing the mother of a child to a “host,” the unborn child to a “virus,” announcing that “science cannot be applied to my body,” and appearing to cast doubt on the very possibility of ever discovering for certain when the heart of an unborn child actually begins beating.
It was a pathetic performance, but all it goes to show is that abortion supporters are running scared, and getting ever more desperate. They know that science paints an utterly compelling picture of the humanity of the unborn child. And so they have to do what secularists never thought they would have to do – appeal to vague “philosophical” ideas to call into question the rock solid findings of natural science. But the truth will always be known in the end – and so we know that they’re fighting a losing battle.