If Life Begins Once, About 3 Billion Years Ago

The abortion battle is heating up again and its echoes reach the current Senate debates about whether to confirm Judge Robert H. Bork as a Supreme Court justice.

People generally identify pro-abortion as a liberal position and anti-abortion as conservative. This may be a mistake, because polls show considerable independence between usually defined political liberalism and a person’s attitude toward abortion. As a person who considers himself a conservative but who nonetheless supports women’s choice in reproductive matters, I want to present a conservative argument for abortion.

Conservatism can be characterized by three attitudes: First, a keen appreciation of the future, and the future costs of present actions; second, an insistence on minimal interference with personal freedom; third, an unflagging awareness of the public costs of private actions. In sum, the conservative hopes to conserve community wealth and well-being, as well as private freedom. If many liberals agree on these points, so much the better for community peace.

The “pro-life” position is usually identified as conservative but it ignores certain realities of biology and human language, being wedded to a simple, non-scientific understanding of the meaning of the word life .

As a scientist I am embarrassed to admit that much present confusion would not have developed had biology teachers done their job better during the past 50 years.

Appearing before legislative committees I have repeatedly been asked, “When does life begin?” That, I have answered, is the wrong question.

The present-tense does in “When does life begin?” implies a repeated or habitual action. By the middle of the 19th Century it was clear that the beginning of life is not a repeated event. No human has ever witnessed the beginning of life; and a subtle but convincing argument supports the conclusion that life began on earth only once, about 3 billion years ago.

In the human case the facts are as follows: A living sperm cell unites with a living egg cell, and the resultant living fertilized egg (or zygote) then goes on to divide into about 100-million-million cells. Every cell is alive at its “birth,” and every one gets its life from a preceding cell. No cell ever originates its own life.

The question lawmakers should ask is, “When does a human life begin?” This is not a quibble. Emphasis on the adjective “human” changes the inquiry to a question of definition. At what point in the sequence from one living cell to 100-million-million living cells should we choose to define the product as “human”?

Before the 19th Century, before the facts of biological development were made clear, a folkish--but erroneous--view of human development supported the right to early abortions. A pregnant woman’s first sensations of the embryo’s movement were spoken of as a “quickening.” Just what was meant by this term was never very clear, but there was a suggestion that whatever was present in the uterus was first “quickened into life” at about three or four months.

This was nonsense; the embryo is alive from the very beginning. Long before the 12th week, the embryo moves; its motions are simply too feeble to be felt.

Using their own language, theologians asked when the “soul” entered that thing the woman was carrying. St. Thomas Aquinas thought “ensoulment” took place at three months if it was male, four months if it was female (sexism at the theological level). Both before and after St. Thomas, Christianity erected only the feeblest barriers to early abortions--until the late 19th Century.

Then biologists discovered that all developmental stages are alive. And in the middle of the 20th Century, DNA, the very stuff of heredity, was discovered.

DNA contains the information that tells a cell what to do, what to become. The DNA of a human zygote tells it to become a human being (under favorable conditions). The DNA of a cow zygote tells it to become a cow. By extremely sophisticated methods we can identify the DNA of all human stages of development as human DNA. Therefore, say pro-lifers, we must recognize all developmental stages as human, and forbid killing at any stage.

On its face, this may look like a logical argument for prohibiting abortion but biologists don’t think so. And their position is consistent with the common law.

Some time ago, in a town near my home, a man shot his pregnant wife in the abdomen. The embryo was killed, but the wife survived. The man was then charged with the murder of the child and the attempted murder of his wife. Without hesitation the judge dismissed the first charge and accepted the second (which resulted in a conviction).

In law, there is no child until the conceptus is born alive. No child, no human being, no possibility of murder.

Yet pro-lifers now tell us that “Every day 3,000 unborn children are killed in the United States.” The number is commendably conservative, but the identification is both biological and linguistic nonsense. “Unborn child” is an oxymoron.

What is aborted is most always a tiny bit of flesh no more than two inches long. To call it an “unborn child” is to impute qualities that will not develop until much later. One could just as reasonably call it “an unborn voter” or “an unborn senior citizen.” We do not give embryonic tissue the vote nor a pension; neither should we treat it as a child.

That which is aborted is neither child nor voter. It only has the potential of becoming them.

In the past half-century medical researchers have shown that fully 50% of the human embryos conceived are spontaneously aborted, usually when only a few days old. In round numbers there are 4 million U.S. births per year. This must be the residue from about 8 million conceptions. Should we refer to the lost embryos as “4 million unborn children”?

Common sense answers no.

Opponents of abortion often assume that the woman who asks for an abortion dislikes children. In most cases, nothing could be further from truth. Women are great realists. When a woman asks to be relieved of a pregnancy it is because she correctly estimates that she cannot, at that time , foresee mustering sufficient capital of love and free time to give the child the start in life she wants it to have. The woman asks for an abortion because she loves children. She wants to delay having a child until it is reasonably probable that she can be a good mother.

If conservatism means anything, it means acting with foresight--choosing the path that has the most acceptable consequences in the long run rather than a path that furnishes merely a momentary satisfaction.

Questions of value are always difficult. They are made easier if dollar estimates can be assigned. In so emotional an area as abortion expressing values in monetary terms is likely to be resented. What I propose is to point out certain aspects in which money is clearly relevant, using this approach as the model for the analysis of non-monetary values.

What does it cost to produce an adult human being? Urban Institute studies indicate that it takes about $100,000 to raise an American child of the middle class to adulthood, including only costs that parents must pay: costs imposed on the community are not included. The cost of a college education is ignored.

What about the non-monetary costs--the love and attention parents must give to the growing, developing child? No firm figure exists but could we know it, the number would surely be in the same ballpark as that $100,000.

It is a truism in the business world that starting up too soon with too little capital is a recipe for failure. The same truism may apply to the risky business of parenthood. It takes money to raise a child well; it also takes capital in the form of love and an enormous amount of time needed to exercise that love. In my experience, women know this better than men.

A future-oriented critic may rightfully argue, “Isn’t contraception better than abortion?” Indeed it is, but that argument ignores the possibility of failure in contraception. No technology is 100% trustworthy.

What women want is a system of birth control giving them complete control of their reproductive function. Abortion is needed as a backstop when contraception fails. A society denying that backstop wastes more than money; it wastes precious resources of love and time. This is not the conservative way to run a nation.