One indeed does have to seriously ask the question. Many, if not most, pro-abortionists do not believe the unborn are fully human or at least not human enough to make abortion murder. There are many sophisticated arguments as to why at least some of them believe this is the case.
It is the central question that must be answered before any discussion on abortion can really begin.
I agree.
When does human life begin?
The U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee in 1981 held hearings on when life begins. The following are samples of evidence submitted by the medical profession (in Shettles with Rorvik 1983, pp. 113-114):
Dr Jerome LeJeune, professor of genetics at the University of Descartes in Paris:
When does life begin? . . . Life has a very long history, but each individual has a very neat beginning, the moment of its conception . . . To accept the fact that after fertilization has taken place a new human being has come into being is no longer a matter of taste or opinion. The human nature of the human being, conception to old age, is not a metaphysical contention, it is plain experimental evidence.
Dr Watson A. Bowes, Jr of the University of Colorado Medical School:
“The beginning of a single human life is from a biological point of view a simple and straightforward matter — the beginning is conception.”
Dr Alfred Bongiovanni of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, after noting that standard medical texts have long taught that human life begins at conception, added:
'I am no more prepared to say that these early stages represent an incomplete human being than I would be to say that the child prior to the dramatic effects of puberty . . . is not a human being'.
Dr Micheline Matthews-Roth, research associate of Harvard University Medical School: “It is scientifically correct to say that an individual human life begins at conception.”
Professor Hymie Gordon, chairman of the Department of Medical Genetics at the Mayo Clinic (Rochester, Minnesota): “By all the criteria of modern molecular biology, life is present from the moment of conception.”
Dr McCarthy De Mere, a practising physician and a law professor at the University of Tennessee: “The exact moment of the beginning [of] personhood and of the human body is at the moment of conception.”
The medical breakthrough came in the 1960s when Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the genetic code (DNA).
'The genotype — the inherited characteristics of a unique human being — is established in the conception process and will remain in force for the entire life of that individual. No other event in biological life is so decisive as this one.... The genotype that is conferred at conception does not merely start life, it defines life' (in Shettles with Rorvik 1983, pp. 36-37).
Biologically, human life begins when the sperm merges with the ovum to form the zygote, containing the full set of 46 chromosomes necessary to create new human life. “The haploid sex cells (ova or spermatozoa) are parts of potential human life. The zygote is human life” (Shettles with Rorvik 1983, p. 40, emphasis in original). The First International Conference on Abortion in Washington D.C., 1967, declared: “We can find no point in time between the union of sperm and egg and the birth of an infant at which point we can say that this in not a human life” (in Stott 1984, p. 286) [from my article:
Abortion and Life: A Christian Perspective].
There is biblical evidence to support this position, but that's for another post if there is interest.
Works consulted
Shettles, L. B. with D. Rorvik 1983 ,
Rites of Life: The Scientific Evidence for Life Before Birth, Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, MI.
Stott, J. 1984, Issues
Facing Christians Today, Marshalls, Basingstoke, Hants.
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