Abortion Justice Planted Seeds of Its Overthrow

When the Roe v. Wade decision was delivered in 1973, Justice Blackmun planted the seeds of its overthrow in the original document.

The appellee [Wade] and certain amici argue that the fetus is a “person” within the language and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. In support of this, they outline at length and in detail the well-known facts of fetal development. If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant’s [Roe’s], case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the Amendment [emphasis added] Roe [156-157].

We knew enough in 1973 to acknowledge that a fetus was a real human being, but our knowledge of DNA and the information contained in it has exploded in the ensuing years.

We know that the genetic information in a newly fertilized egg (if an individual is allowed to develop, be born, and live out a natural life span) will be the same as the genetic information taken from that person’s tissues at the time of death.

The fact is that, scientifically, everything necessary for an individual’s development is there from the very beginning.

We cannot say that there is only a “suggestion of personhood.”

Several interviews that I have listened to and articles I have read recently have emphasized the importance of defining, “What is it?”

One speaker read a section from an embryology textbook, used in medical school, that describes a zygote, which results when an egg and sperm come together, as a new, unique individual, and the way that every human being begins.

That’s from a medical textbook!

Here are a couple of other takes on the topic that I encountered just a few days ago.

When Does Human Life Begin? Thoughts of a Christian OB/GYN Physician

Arguments For The Humanness Of A Fetus — By: Greg Koukl

Confusion on the part of some readers leads me to add a word of explanation to this poem.

It was written around Christmas, when I had been reading the gospel accounts of Jesus’ birth, and it was at a time when debate was raging about whether the unborn child suffered pain during an abortion and should be protected by some kind of mitigation, or by abortion limits.

Slaughter of the Innocents

Herod gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under – Matthew 2:16

It is entirely uncontested in the scientific and medical literature that the fetus experiences pain in some capacity from as early as eight weeks.

As a Bethlehem mother cowered

at the shadow of Herod’s soldier in the door

the womb-held child

unknowing, only sensing

senses invasion and shrinks away

The mother wails and keens;

the womb-held child

can utter no cry

inchoate voice cannot shriek

at knife-sharp pain

Half-light of womb

is pierced by agony

Then dark,

And Rachel may or may not wail for her child

There may or may not be weeping in Ramah.

Rhonda Brown