How To Look At When Life Begins
Don't simplify a complex event
If I invite you to dinner and for dessert, serve you raw eggs on a bed of flour and sugar, do you say “Oh, what a delicious cake!” or “What kind of joke is this?”
It has all the ingredients of a cake, but it’s not a cake. And similarly, a zygote is not yet a morula, a blastomere, a blastocyst, an embryo, a fetus, or a baby. The cake takes a while to come into existence, and so does the infant.
Every time we name something, we know in general what it applies to, but the more closely we look at its boundary, the harder it becomes to draw a bright line. When does day become night? When the sun dips below the horizon? When does death occur? Is it when the heart stops beating, when pupils no longer dilate, when brain activity is undetectable? What counts as theft? Taking a paperclip from the office? Borrowing your neighbor’s lawnmower when he is out? Taking food from a store after a natural disaster?
The claim that life begins at conception is perfectly reasonable, but the debate is distorted by the misuse of language. Beginning is not completion, and even that beginning is not a bright line. Is it when the sperm breaches the ovum? Is it when the two RNA strands start to join, or is it only when the last AT/CG bond forms? If, when there are 8 cells, they split into 4+4 and form identical twins, when does the second life appear? And so on. Life begins at conception, but comes into full existence over a period of time. (Nine missing periods, give or take.)
The search for a sharp dividing line between two states can be acknowledged as futile when we recognize that all boundaries* are fuzzy. But despite their inherent ambiguity, society finds it convenient to draw lines that bisect, as best possible, the distinctions that exist. Civil dusk is the moment when the center of the sun is 6 degrees below the horizon in the evening. Roe v. Wade was an honorable effort to name the midpoint of the complex process in which a human is created. Please do not insult me by serving an unbaked dessert.
* The only exception I can find is mathematics, which in my opinion, occupies a unique place in the world.
Phil, I appreciate your post. To continue with your metaphor, we are all hungry, but I think that some have become so accustomed to gooey cookies that they are now fine with raw cookie dough. Because the menu has been changed so subtly but over time, they wouldn't even know that the dough was supposed to be cooked.