A good friend of mine, having read my American News piece on the Saddleback debate (that's at least one reader!), sent me a dissenting e-mail. He argued that the beginning of life was a fundamentally mysterious matter, and therefore that government should stay out of it and let private judgment prevail. That, I gather, was a defense of Obama's non-answer to the abortion question in the Saddleback debate.
I replied that the beginning of life is not mysterious at all. As a biological organism, every human being begins when daddy's sperm cell unites with mommy's egg. That union creates a genetically unique cell that consumes nutrients, produces waste, and divides. If it eats, grows, and goes potty, its alive. The line that begins with that Ur-cell is a biological being. And from the first, it is some kind of being: not a bovine being, or a canine being, but a human being. The question regarding abortion, then, is not when does human life begin, but when does personhood begin? Personhood implies rights and interests that other human beings and the state should respect. To argue in favor of abortion, without ignoring the obvious facts I have just mentioned, you have to argue that human beings exist for some time before they acquire personhood. But that means that all human beings are not created equal. Only those who achieve some state of development have "human rights," while others do not; or at least, not yet. That is a lot to give up. Pro-life people are willing to take this issue on, while pro-choice people scrupulously avoid it. My friend was no exception.
But even if you think that the question of the beginning of life is mysterious, the state will have to step in at some point. Mom and dad might decide to abort a fetus if test suggest some genetic defect, but the State surely won't allow them to end the life their Down's child when he is ten years old. So the question is this: when does legal personhood begin? At what point in the history of the biological being does the state step in and say: this is a person, under our protection? At viability? At birth? That is not a private question. It is a political question. Obama's refusal to answer was a forfeit. It suggests what I have long suspected: that abortion is corrupting. Obam
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