Pro-Life Conversations of Grace

What makes pro-life conversations so hard?

Right now, unfortunately, the words people use to talk about abortion only deepen the confusion. In fact, it’s becoming rare to hear the word abortion at all. You’re much more likely to hear things like women’s healthcare, reproductive freedom and that women should have the right to make choices regarding their own bodies.

Abortion has become so normal that, according to the Guttmacher Institute, one out of every four women in the U.S. has an abortion by the age of 45. That means everywhere you go you probably encounter women and men affected by this issue.

Plus the way people talk about abortion makes it seem like it’s simply an issue of preference—a “true for you but not for me” kind of thing. We would never say the same thing about other moral issues like human trafficking or racism. But our culture seems committed to framing abortion as a matter of “choice” for women. If a woman gets pregnant and doesn’t want to be, our culture promotes the idea that she ought to be able to choose abortion.

But what is the nature of this particular choice?

Who are the preborn?

To have a real conversation about what it means to be pro-life, especially in light of the support for abortion, our first goal needs to be clarity. So we have to zero in like a laser on an important question that most people overlook: “Who are the preborn?”

• Think of the reasons that are often given for abortion: “It’s an issue of privacy that should remain between a woman and her doctor.”
• “She can’t afford to feed another child.”
• “Why would you make an unwanted child be born, only to face hardship?”
• “If a baby has a disability, abortion keeps him or her from suffering.”
• “Women should be allowed to pursue their education or their dreams without an unplanned pregnancy standing in the way.”

Notice that all of those reasons deal with something important. No one would deny the seriousness of privacy, poverty, suffering or hardships. But each of these reasons assumes that the preborn are not human beings.

Think about it. If the conversation were about a 2-year-old, and we used any of those reasons to justify terminating him or her, the person talking to us would call us crazy! Everyone agrees that toddlers are human regardless of being expensive, unwanted, disabled or standing in the way of something we want.

“Who are the preborn?” is asking whether the preborn are just as human as toddlers. And the answer is yes!

Conversations with science

Once we’ve brought the focus back to that central question, we can offer an answer. Scripture has plenty to say about the sanctity of life, but the science of embryology (em-bree-ology), a field of study dedicated to the preborn, provides the answer. According to science, a living, distinct, whole human being comes into being from the moment of fertilization. The preborn are alive because they do all the things any organism does, including growing and turning food into energy. Even though an embryo (em-bree-oh), the name given to a human being during the first eight weeks of life, is attached to her mother, she is not part of the mother’s body. Each embryo has her own unique genetic code.

Each preborn child is also a whole human being. She isn’t just part of an organism like the cells I could scratch from the skin of my arm. Bodily cells work together in a coordinated way to make sure that you, the organism, are operating as a whole. Even at the single-cell stage, an embryo’s parts work together to make sure she is surviving and thriving.

Yet you’ll often hear an embryo described as nothing more than “a clump of cells” or “a mass of tissue,” as if you could add some more parts until you have the final “product,” a baby. But a preborn person does something remarkable. She drives her own development from within. That means that you didn’t come from an embryo; you once were an embryo. You came into being all at once and have matured to this point. And you are still developing.