MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry has never exactly been known for her scientific expertise. Harris-Perry has made a career out of defending abortion, and once, about four years ago, she displayed not only stunning ignorance, but also an offensively callous attitude towards human life — the same dehumanizing attitude portrayed by so many abortion supporters.
In the four-year-old video below, Harris-Perry held a model of a ‘fertilized egg’ — known as a zygote — during a discussion on abortion and asked how much it might cost to have “this thing” turn into a human.
Harris-Perry was holding a model of a uterus, complete with zygote, which she quickly broke. “Oh, no! That might be bad. I seemed to have popped open the fertilized egg,” she said. “We’ll put that back together.”
After breaking the model, she quickly recovered and continued. “But the very idea that this would constitute a person, right? And that some set of constitutional rights should come to this,” she argued. “Look, I get that that is a particular kind of faith claim. It’s not associated with science. But the reality is that if this turns into a person, right, there are economic consequences, right? The cost to raise a child, $10,000 a year up to $20,000 a year. When you’re talking about what it actually costs to have this thing turn into a human, why not allow women to make the best choices that we can with as many resources and options instead of trying to come in and regulate this process?”
Here, Harris-Perry is pretending that she cares about “science,” but she’s hardly an unbiased source on the issue of abortion; she’s a recipient of Planned Parenthood’s Maggie Award, and previously responded to excitement surrounding the birth of England’s Prince George by shilling for abortion and claiming that life begins whenever you feel like it does.
Harris-Perry has herself demonstrated that abortion activists rarely care about the science of preborn human life and will deny it whenever necessary to continue promoting abortion.
The biological reality is actually quite clear; scientists have been able to pinpoint the exact moment life begins. This can be seen in dozens of scientific textbooks, and in quotes from medical experts. We know, for a scientific fact, that our hearts begin beating as early as 16 days after conception. Brain waves can be measured by six and a half weeks; by 10 weeks, the baby has her own unique fingerprints.
While Harris-Perry held a model of a human zygote and referred to preborn babies as “things” pro-life people want to protect only because of “faith claims,” the reality is that she is the one who is denying science, over and over again, in her quest to defend abortion. The “thing” she’s referring to is a human being; scientifically, there is no question about that. And then attaching a question of cost to the argument makes it even more despicable; are we really going to begin arguing that a human being’s worth and right to life should be connected to how much money it costs to raise him or keep him alive?
It’s bad enough that Harris-Perry and others like her deny science and simple biological fact while pretending to make a scientific argument; to then argue that people should be allowed to kill other people merely because it might cost a lot of money to keep them alive makes it even more grotesque and horrifying. It’s really enough to make you wonder how people like Harris-Perry sleep at night.
