Category Archives: News>Reproductive rights

The anti-abortion SLED argument is no Rosebud

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“I don’t care about your goddamn religion.”

Perhaps you’ve seen the 2018 viral clip of Ana Kasparian of the Young Turks saying this. She makes clear that she doesn’t want to upset Christians’ right to live as they see fit and demands the same consideration for herself.

I don’t care what the Bible says…. All those women who identify with your religion have every right in the world to not get an abortion, to not take birth control, but they do not have the right to dictate my life.

Tim Barnett of the STR ministry pushes back in “Making the Case WITHOUT the Bible” (March 23, 2022). He says the Bible is not necessary to make the pro-life case, just science and philosophy.

First, he says that embryology teaches that “from the earliest stages of development the unborn are distinct, living, whole human beings.”

No, “human beings” is at the core of the debate. We’ll revisit this question of what the zygote (the single fertilized human egg cell) is or isn’t compared to the newborn.

And note the irony of a ministry eagerly following the conclusions of embryology while demanding the right to pick and choose their science. I’ve written much about STR’s shameless rejection of evolution, but embryology is apparently an area of biology they’ll accept. When these non-scientists set themselves up as arbiters of science, we clearly can’t trust any of their science-based arguments.

You didn’t come from an embryo; you once were an embryo, and there’s no ethical difference between the embryo you once were and the adult you are today.

This is the key pro-life claim: different though they may be, the zygote and the newborn are morally identical where it counts. The one way to state this commonality that we’ll both agree on is that the zygote and the newborn are both living, and both have Homo sapiens DNA.

Big deal. That’s also true for a scratched-off skin cell.

The pro-life response would be that the skin cell won’t develop into a newborn (but the zygote could), at which point the curtain falls away, and we see that their argument is just the Argument from Potential. That zygote isn’t a person now, but it will be! (Or substitute a similar word for “person”: baby, newborn, human being, or whatever.) After it develops into a person, we can’t ethically kill that person, but that’s not true when it’s just a zygote.

A compelling pro-life argument can’t be extracted from the Argument from Potential, and the nine months of gestation can’t be ignored. Barnett is correct that each of us was once an embryo, but there is a huge ethical difference between a one-hundred-cell embryo and a person.

SLED argument: Size

Barnett then ticks off the points in the popular but tired SLED argument.

You see, there are only four differences between the embryo you once were and the adult you are today: Size, Level of development, Environment, and degree of Dependency.

True, unborn humans are smaller than born humans. But since when does physical size give you value?

Someone isn’t paying attention. A newborn might become 12 times heavier by the time they’re a teenager. But that newborn is 12 orders of magnitude bigger than it was as a zygote! That’s right—the single cell zygote becomes trillions of cells. Said another way, the zygote-to-newborn jump is a hundred billion times larger than the newborn-to-teenager jump.

This is no difference in degree where it’s the same thing, just bigger. A one-pound Great Dane puppy becomes the same thing, just bigger, as a full-grown, 150-pound adult. No, we’re talking about a difference in kind, where the embryo eventually becomes something very different.

This will become clearer with point 2.

Point 2: Level of development

Sure, unborn humans are less developed than you or I. But so what? There are plenty of born humans that are less developed than you or I. Are we more valuable? Of course not.

Let’s think of some examples. Someone might be wheelchair-bound. They might have cancer. They might have a traumatic brain injury. Or they might be a single cell.

(One of these things is not like the other. Can you guess which one?)

Barnett’s thinking is far too small. It’s true that the set of “people” is a lot broader than just beautiful movie stars and athletic sports icons. But consider the difference between a newborn and an old person from a distant culture. That is negligible compared to the gulf between that newborn versus the single-cell zygote.

Here’s a chart to illustrate the differences.

Point 3: Environment

What about environment? Where you are has no bearing on your intrinsic worth. So how does the journey of eight inches down the birth canal change your essential value? Spoiler: it doesn’t.

Society needs unambiguous lines to define what is legal and what isn’t. The Roe decision used trimesters. Viability (the fetus being able to survive outside the womb) could be another. Barnett is referring to birth as another line, though few pro-choice advocates would insist on abortion being legal until birth.

This is a tangent.

Note the irony of a ministry eagerly following the conclusions of embryology while demanding the right to pick and choose their science.

Point 4: degree of Dependence

Finally, unborn humans are completely dependent on another for their survival, but so are newborns and the severely handicapped and the comatose and so on. Are they still valuable?

I respond as I did above—the differences between you and me, a newborn, and a disabled or comatose person are trivial when compared against the gulf separating a newborn and the zygote that it was nine months prior.

That’s why I’m pro life. No Bible verses, no religion, just science and careful thinking.

Yes, religion. This is clear when you pick and choose the science you follow based on your religious presuppositions—evolution is bad, but embryology gets a green light.

The religious agenda is also apparent when that’s what guides the argument, not the facts. Compare a zygote and a newborn. Do you see the similarity (they’re the same species) rather than the differences (see the chart above)? If you think the tenuous similarity is the takeaway, you’re enslaved to an agenda.

For more on the SLED argument, see Arguing the Pro-Life Case (Such as It Is).

If Christians really have
the 100% direct poop on what’s moral and what isn’t,
directly from God’s lips to their ears,
how come they can’t agree on what it is?
— commenter RichardSRussell

What is the pro-life goal?

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Is the pro-life movement so blinders-on focused on the plight of single-celled zygotes that they haven’t noticed where their bus is going? Their destination isn’t a play pen with laughing babies but an illegal abortion clinic with teenage girls afraid of the procedure and terrified that they’ll be reported to police by some Christian busybody.

Personal responsibility

But first, let’s look at one more reaction to the tweet that started this set of articles (part 1).

How about the concept of personal responsibility? I am stunned at how Americans no longer want to be responsible for themselves or their actions. From abortion to free everything, we’ve become a nation of irresponsible freeloaders.

Are you a freeloader if you get food from a church food bank or take other forms of church charity? If church members can give charity to needy people who aren’t freeloaders but need a little temporary help, why can’t taxpayers do the same thing through government programs?

I presume part of this complaint is that a pregnant woman must take responsibility for her actions. Yes, and she might take responsibility by getting an abortion.

Consider a parallel medical need, someone injured in a car accident. The person who drives a car knows there’s some chance of an accident, but the emergency room personnel don’t disqualify them even if they were irresponsible. Similarly, a woman who has sex knows there’s a risk of pregnancy, but the abortion clinic doesn’t disqualify her either.

(While we’re talking about responsibility, note the irresponsibility of U.S. churches who hide behind a loophole that allows them, and only them, to accept nonprofit status but not open their financial records to prove to the American public that they’re using that financial benefit wisely. Only two percent of U.S. churches file the IRS 990 financial disclosure form. Do they have something to hide? That’s what the rest of us are thinking, and Christian churches should push for the removal of this embarrassing loophole. More about churches and hidden finances here.)

Trying to illustrate how taking responsibility works, one Twitter reply showed a meme of a pair of pants with the caption, “Used as directed, prevents 100% of all unwanted pregnancies and STDs, with zero nasty side effects!”

Not really. “Keep your pants on” is an effective contraceptive in the same way “Don’t eat so much” is a practical weight-loss diet and “Just stop smoking” is valuable advice for someone trying to quit.

Christians, don’t focus on making abortion illegal. Focus instead on making it unnecessary.

What is the pro-life goal, really?

The pro-life goal is to replace Planned Parenthood with Kermit Gosnell, the illegal abortion clinic doctor who was convicted in 2013 of the murders of three infants delivered alive plus the manslaughter of one patient. As Chris Charbonneau observed, you can’t eliminate abortion; all you can do is make it more dangerous. With legal avenues gone but the demand still there, abortions will just be illegal. We’re not in the dark about what will happen since we’ve already been here. Before the Roe decision in 1973, the per capita abortion rate was higher than it is today.

Demand is the key to a sensible abortion policy, not prohibition. We must focus on reducing the demand, which means reducing unwanted pregnancies.

I’m about to explain the unsurprising route to reducing unwanted pregnancies but first I want to check in with any pro-life Christians. Do you really think of abortion as murder? Do you think of the 930,000 annual abortions in the U.S. as a holocaust? If so, keep that thought in mind as we continue.

The first step to reduce unwanted pregnancies is comprehensive sex education in schools. Sex can’t be taboo if we expect students to really understand where babies come from, how consent works, how contraceptives work, sexually-transmitted infections, the myths surrounding sex, and so on. Second, contraceptives (especially the most reliable kind, the Long-Acting Reversible Contraceptives) should be subsidized and easily available.

At this point in the discussion, many conservative Christians push back. There’ll be no 12-year-olds putting condoms on bananas if they have anything to say about it! But prudery is no excuse when we’re talking about murder—right, my Christian friends? You did say that what we’re trying to avoid is murder, right? Of course sex ed must be age appropriate, but children must learn the facts early enough so they’re comfortable with them before they need them.

Based on what I’ve seen, conservative politicians have no interest in seeing the abortion question resolved. They benefit from an ongoing fight where they can say, “The sky is falling! Vote for me!” This means that they would be the last ones pointing out how the differences could be resolved. Following a conservative politician’s advice on how to respond to abortion is like getting advice from a crisis pregnancy center on how to respond to an unwanted pregnancy.

Christians, don’t focus on making abortion illegal. Focus instead on making it unnecessary. You’ll make a lot more progress working with pro-choice advocates on the common goal of reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies.

See more: Most US abortions are due to the pro-life movement

Mandated, forced or compulsory pregnancy
contravenes enumerated rights in the Constitution,
namely the 13th Amendment’s prohibition
against involuntary servitude and protection of bodily autonomy,
as well as the 14th Amendment’s defense of privacy and freedom.
— Prof. Michele Goodwin, New York Times

6 pro-life flaws that pro-lifers must stop ignoring

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I want to expose six fundamental flaws that underlie the pro-life position. I will then propose solutions to strengthen it.

It’s two days since the U.S. Supreme Court draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked. My goal isn’t to scold pro-life advocates and tell them how they’re flushing the country down the toilet but to expose some of their errors and show how to fix them. In this post, let’s look at the problems.

(Going forward, I will use “you” to refer to an imaginary pro-life advocate.)

Problem 1: Abstinence doesn’t work as birth control

Congress has put billions into abstinence-only sex education. That money peaked during the Bush administration, was largely redirected to other sex ed programs during the Obama administration, and increased again during the Trump administration. As one example, the Texas state board of education in 2020 doubled down on abstinence as the focus of sex ed.

But these programs don’t work. Toward the end of the Bush administration, a study was done to evaluate the results of these programs. Out of 700 federally funded abstinence-only sex education programs, “[four] were handpicked to show positive results and they still failed”! There was no increase in sexual abstinence, no increase in the age of sexual debut, and no decrease in the number of partners.

We can analyze this another way. Look at the 2018 list of states ranked by teen birth rate. Take the top 10 worst states and compare them against the top 10 reddest states (ranked by the percentage that voted for Trump in 2016). Six are on both lists: Arkansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Alabama.

Now do the opposite comparison: match the 10 lowest teen birth rate states with the top 10 bluest states (ranked by the percentage voting for Clinton). Again, six are on both lists: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and New York. None of the worst-birth-rate states are on the blue list, and none of the best-birth-rate states are on the red list. Whatever conservative states are doing, it’s not working.

Now consider abstinence teaching in schools. While it’s hard to make a quantitative comparison, the Guttmacher Institute shows that bluer states are (in general) likelier to cover abstinence, cover contraception, and take a positive view of sexual orientation. Redder states are likelier to stress (rather than merely cover) abstinence and emphasize that sex is reserved for marriage. They are less likely to cover contraception or take a positive view of sexual orientation.

Laws about corridor width won’t matter if the abortion can come through the mail.

But isn’t abstinence 100% effective?

I’ve talked with conservatives who shake their heads at my ignorance and inform me that abstinence by definition eliminates the need for abortion. Abstinence means no sex, no sex means no pregnancy, and no pregnancy means no abortion—QED.

But it obviously doesn’t work like that in the real world. The effectiveness of contraception is measured in two different situations, perfect use and typical use. Perfect use is how it is used during a clinical trial, where every step is done correctly. Typical use is how it is used by ordinary consumers, and these consumers can misunderstand or misread directions, not bother with or forget to take a daily pill, ignore cautions, and so on. So, yes, the perfect use of abstinence gives perfect results, but as we’ve seen above, typical use of abstinence gives poor results.

Abstinence “always works” in the way that dieting always works. If your last weight-loss diet or fitness commitment didn’t work, then you probably have first-hand experience with typical use not matching the expectation of perfect use. It’s like saying “Don’t get shot!” to someone off to war or “Just stop smoking!” to someone trying to quit—not really useful advice since you’re confusing typical use with perfect use.

Abstinence isn’t even a birth control method. To see this, imagine you plan to do some outdoor chores and ask someone for a recommendation for sunscreen. Their response: stay inside.

It’s true that if you stay inside you won’t get too much sun, but that ignores your goal of doing chores. “Stay inside” isn’t a kind of sunscreen.

The choice of birth control method asks, assuming I will be sexually active, what is the best method to avoid STDs and pregnancy? “Just don’t have sex” doesn’t answer the question.

Problem 2: You focus on the symptom, not the problem

Abortion isn’t the problem; abortion is the symptom. No one would have abortions without the problem of an unwanted pregnancy.

No one enjoys getting an abortion. It’s an unpleasant medical procedure with some risk. About this we’re all on the same page, which brings us to the next problem.

Problem 3: You’re working against the pro-choice community

You might wonder why you’d want to work with your enemy, but you’d obviously be more effective if you could work with the pro-choice community on shared goals.

The pro-life movement wants no abortions and the pro-choice movement wants to keep them as an option, but there is common ground. Both would like to see fewer unwanted pregnancies. An unwanted pregnancy prevented is far cheaper, safer, and easier than one treated with an abortion. Fewer unwanted pregnancies mean less demand for abortions (which makes pro-life advocates happy), and that means less pressure to restrict abortions (which makes pro-choice advocates happy).

Take a step back and consider the status quo. The pro-life movement’s focus on the wrong thing—the symptom of abortion rather than the problem of unwanted pregnancy—is so flawed that it looks deliberate. It’s like someone wants there to be conflict, to prevent people coming together and making progress on the real problem.

(More on that puzzle in the next post.)

Problem 4: Children will become sexually mature, whether you like it or not

Christian pundit James Dobson said about the 2020 decision by the Texas state board of education to focus sex ed on abstinence:

Activists groups like Planned Parenthood and its morally bankrupt allies were salivating at the chance to eliminate abstinence-based teaching once and for all and replace it with a not-suitable-for-children indoctrination program. If they got their way, 11 and 12-year-olds would spend classroom time learning about gender identity, condom use and other highly sexualized topics.

By “11 and 12-year-olds,” I assume you mean “children who are about to become sexually mature.” Yes, they need to understand how their bodies will soon work.

Imagine a world where every teenager got a car, and you couldn’t prevent that. They would be eager to drive their cars, and all you as a parent could do would be to put up constraints and educate them so that when they left your house as adults, they would be responsible drivers.

Wouldn’t you want them to get driver’s ed?

In our world, people are getting married later and sexually maturing sooner. In the U.S., women are marrying on average at age 27 and men at age 29. Onset of puberty is now 10–11 for girls and a year later for boys (about five years earlier than it was in the 1800s). The process is complete about five years later.

That’s a given, and your only option is how to respond. “Wait until marriage” won’t work for everyone. It’s particularly naive given the many years typically between sexual maturity and marriage. Wouldn’t you want them to get driver’s ed?

Abstinence “always works” in the way that dieting always works. If your last weight-loss diet or fitness commitment didn’t work, then you probably have first-hand experience with typical use not matching the expectation of perfect use.

Problem 5: Making abortion illegal doesn’t prevent abortions

Remember Kermit Gosnell? He ran a filthy abortion clinic in Philadelphia that provided illegal late-term abortions, and he was sentenced to life in prison in 2011. Though they may not realize it, this is pro-life advocates’ goal. When safe and legal abortion is unavailable, it will be performed in unsafe, illegal clinics. One of Gosnell’s patients said about the closest Planned Parenthood clinic, “The picketers out there, they just scared me half to death.”

We’re seeing the beginnings of this today. A study of the restrictive climate in Texas, where more than half of abortion clinics have closed, has found that seven percent of patients seeking abortion tried to end the pregnancy on their own rather than jump the obstacles to get to a clinic. That’s more than three times the national average. The restrictions in Texas have also made late-term abortions increase.

Reliable data about the abortion rate before the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision made abortion legal nationwide is hard to find, but roughly 800,000 abortions, mostly illegal, were performed per year. That’s roughly the rate today. With our substantially higher population, that means the per-capita abortion rate was higher before Roe.

We find the same thing in other countries. Abortion rates are highest in countries where the procedure is illegal. No, making abortion illegal won’t make it end.

Problem 6: Obstacles erected for abortion clinics won’t work against medication abortions

Nuisance regulations like demanding that clinics have two-gurney-wide corridors or that their doctors have hospital admitting privileges (as Texas has imposed) will become less relevant. Medication abortions are abortions done by pills rather than an operation, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved this treatment twenty years ago. For abortions up to ten weeks’ gestation, the majority are done this way in the U.S., and that fraction is increasing.

Laws about corridor width won’t matter if the abortion can come through the mail. Prescription drugs already come into the U.S. illegally from countries with cheaper prices. The tighter the controls on bricks-and-mortar clinics, the more demand for safe medication abortions will increase.

Conclusion: Let’s find solutions to these problems and find ways to make the pro-life movement effective here.

“Explain to me how making abortion illegal
wouldn’t lower abortion rates.”
Explain to me how making drugs illegal
didn’t lower drug use rates.
— commenter adam

Abortion: Does the Bible Say When Life Begins?

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does the bible say when life begins?

Does the Bible say that life begins at first breath? If so, that strengthens the pro-choice argument.

Tim Barnett from the Stand to Reason ministry uses his background as a teacher to grade the logic of arguments that attack his conservative Christian beliefs. His video series is called Red Pen Logic. Today’s topic is, “The Bible Doesn’t Say What He Thinks It Says.”

The problem comes from actor and political commentator John Fugelsang, who attacked the popular Christian claim that life begins at conception with this tweet:

Well don’t tell God [that life begins at conception], bc the Bible says Life begins at First Breath.

Sorry, I didn’t write it.

Fugelsang is probably referring to this verse from the Garden of Eden story: “Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7).

The importance of “breath”

Barnett responded that God breathed into Adam, and then Adam came to life. The “breath” wasn’t Adam’s first breath, like a newborn’s first breath would be. This is a unique situation and doesn’t apply elsewhere.

But the Jewish interpretation disagrees, and this is critical since Jesus was a Jew. Breath is central to the Genesis idea of life. In the verse above, “the man became a living being,” is literally translated as, “the man became a breathing creature.” Breath is roughly synonymous with life.

Not only does the Bible say that the “breath of life” is what living things have, it’s what they don’t have when they die. This is what the dying animals during the Flood lost: “Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died” (Gen. 7:22). Another example is from the Canaanite genocide: “But as for the towns of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive” (Deuteronomy 20:16). One commentary says, “Breath is understood to be essential to life; and that when the breathing stops, life ends.”

The Christian case

And now comes the obligatory dueling Bible quotes part of the argument. Barnett says that the Bible recognizes life before “first breath” and says, “The Bible consistently elevates the status of unborn humans to valuable individuals.”

He cites two Bible passages. First, “You formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13). That sounds pretty bland, but Barnett interprets this to mean that we exist “as ourselves” before birth.

I don’t see it. First, “knitted” (Strong’s #05526) is more literally “wove,” as would be done with a protective screen or fence woven from branches, and by implication it can mean to fence in, cover, or protect. Yes, it’s important for a fetus to be in a protective womb when it is developing, but this simply acknowledges the gestation process. During that process, you aren’t you, but (with luck) you will be by the end.

Read that entire psalm. It’s a worshipful acknowledgement of God’s omniscience and power. Some variation on “you were you even at the beginning of the gestation process” is not the message.

Barnett’s second Bible response is Luke 1:41–44 where John the Baptist (as a fetus in his mother Elizabeth) leapt for joy when he first came in contact with Jesus (as a younger fetus in Mary). He tells us, “Jesus and John were themselves long before first breath.”

What does that even mean? Yes, the process of gestation was underway. That’s it. At that stage, they might have looked to the untrained eye indistinguishable from an elephant. “[They] were themselves” distills down to their DNA being in place and functioning, I guess—pretty underwhelming.

Passages on the other side of the question

Let’s return to the Bible for verses showing God’s attitude toward life. Exodus 21:22–3 says that if a man injures a woman and causes a miscarriage, he is only fined. If instead he causes an injury to the woman, he is penalized “an eye for an eye.” In other words, a fetus is less important than an adult.

Here, though, experts differ on the best interpretation. Are we talking about a miscarriage (the fetus dies) or just a premature birth (it lives)? If the latter, just a fine might be reasonable. This passage doesn’t help us much.

Another is the “trial of the bitter water” in Numbers 5. Here, the issue is a husband who suspects his wife of adultery. The priest creates a potion for the wife to drink, with a curse if she’s guilty. To be clear, the problem isn’t “My wife is pregnant, and I want that fetus gone if it’s not mine” but rather “I need to know if my wife has been unfaithful.” (More here.)

God’s judgment on the woman, if guilty, sounds like a prolapsed uterus. And if the woman were pregnant, that curse would likely cause a miscarriage. God clearly doesn’t much care about a little collateral damage in the pursuit of justice. Maybe pro-lifers like Barrett should take the hint.

The hint gets far louder when you remember God’s rampages. He drowned almost all the life on the planet, and he commanded genocide.

He even demanded human sacrifice. First, he created the law:

Consecrate to me every firstborn male. The first offspring of every womb among the Israelites belongs to me, whether human or animal (Exodus 13:2).

And later, he mocked Israel for it:

So I gave them other statutes that were not good and laws through which they could not live; I defiled them through their gifts—the sacrifice of every firstborn—that I might fill them with horror so they would know that I am Jehovah (Ezekiel 20:25–6).

And the Bible contains a scattering of killings to show that God doesn’t place the lives of babies at the top of his list (see here and here).

Jewish sources on abortion

The Talmud is the source of religious law for rabbinic Judaism. It draws the rather common sense conclusion that the fetus, especially in its earliest days, has a very different moral value than a human child or adult: “The [Talmud] states that: ‘the embryo is considered to be mere water until the fortieth day.’ Afterwards, it is considered subhuman until it is born” (source).

Another source says,

Unlike in Catholicism, in Judaism the fetus isn’t a legal person until it’s born, so abortion can’t be murder. (This isn’t even as different from Catholicism as it seems. The Catholic Church itself didn’t insist that life began at conception until 1869. Before that, the Church tolerated abortions through the 40th day of pregnancy.)

About the abortion debate, one rabbi said,

Most of the [Old Testament verses] that [conservative Christians are] bringing in for this are ridiculous. They’re using my sacred text to justify taking away my rights in a way that is just so calculated and craven.

When does life begin?

This is Barnett’s final question, and here he turns to science rather than the Bible. He cited a book on embryology that said, “[an embryo] is a human being from the time of fertilization.”

This doesn’t help. It just raises the question, what is a “human being”? If it’s by definition a Homo sapiens life form from single fertilized egg cell until death, then sure. But quoting a definition is no argument.

Let me respond with three points. First, the answer to “When did life begin?” is “Life began on earth about 3.5 billion years ago.” The egg and sperm are already alive, so when they join, the fertilized egg cell doesn’t then become alive. What begins is the gestation process for a new offspring.

Note how off-target the mindless celebration of “life” can be. Slugs and mosquitoes are alive, but pests don’t have much inherent value. There’s a range of value here, and we kill living things all the time. We’re all on the same page about the value of a newborn. The problem is giving that single cell the value of a newborn right now, not nine months from now.

A newborn is really complicated

And finally, that brings us to the strangely appealing desire that sucks in many conservative Christians, the need to dismiss the changes that happen during the course of a human pregnancy. Comparing the two ends of that process, there are a few things that are the same. The single cell and the newborn are both alive, and they both have H. sapiens DNA. That’s about it.

But there are some things that are radically different. The newborn has about one trillion (1,000,000,000,000) cells, each one differentiated and fitted with other cells in a precise arrangement. The single cell is . . . 1 cell. The newborn has arms and legs, eyes and ears, a stomach and digestive system, brain and nervous system, heart and circulatory system, skin, liver, and on and on. The single cell doesn’t have a single cell of any of this.

If you want to define “human being” so that it includes both newborn and single cell, that’s fine. But then you need to come up with some term that describes that gap. We have lots of words for subtle differences among young children—newborn, baby, child, infant, toddler, and so on—so surely we can find a word for the enormous change that happens from fertilization until birth. For example, I’d say that a newborn is a person while the single cell isn’t. If you object to the word “person,” then suggest something better. We need a term like “personhood” to describe the enormous spectrum from single cell (not at all a person) to the newborn (100% person).

Biblical arguments have no place in making laws in a country governed by a secular constitution like the United States. And even when we look in the Bible to see what it says, the pro-life argument is poorly supported.

Abortion—the issue that gets followers of Christ
to vote against everything Christ talked about,
by talking about something Christ never talked about.
— @JohnFugelsang

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Image from Kelly Sikkema (free-use license)
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