Recently the Huffington Post partnered up with TED for TED weekends, and the response to one particular article was massive. HuffPo and TED showed the miracle of the creation of life – at conception. The article generated 52 thousand Facebook likes and some heated debate in the 3,000+ comments.
It’s called “Revealing Life’s Wonder with Art,” and with it, Alexander Tsiaras, medical doctor and founder, CEO, and editor-in-chief of theVisualMD.com, shares with the world the “beautiful and efficient anatomy of pregnancy.” His film, “From Conception to Birth,” brings us into the womb and masterfully awakens us to the heavily debated truth that life begins at conception, not birth. He says:
It’s almost impossible to express how privileged I’ve felt to watch the process of conception to birth, as genetic mechanisms dynamically instruct each fetal cell of where to go and what to become…Our beautiful and efficient anatomy is truly awesome and endlessly fascinating. When I began to review the scans of babies that captured each micrometer of developing tissue, my son was in utero. There were so many revelations that surprised and deeply affected me. Suddenly, my work on development was very personal[.]
In a speech from 2010, Tsarias talks about how technology is able to show us things we’ve never been able to see before, including how people develop inside the womb. He goes on to show a clip from his film in which we see the inseminated egg divide for the first time, and it’s labeled on screen as “baby’s first division.” It shows the heart developing at 25 days and the hands and arms at 32 days. It talks about how rapid the baby is developing. And it follows this journey until birth, revealing just how human and living fetuses are.
Tsarias calls the data “pretty spectacular,” “complexity beyond comprehension,” and “magic.” Being able to see how the baby develops in those first 8 weeks alone is astounding as he or she grows from egg to recognizable human with a beating heart, arms, legs, and a face. This is one of the most exciting sides of the advances in technology. The fact that fetuses are human cannot be denied, because we can literally see them. Which makes the concern of abortion not “are fetuses human?,” but rather “as humans, are fetuses worthy of rights?”
What is most amazing may be, however, that Tsiaras’s talk is the number one most popular in TEDWeekends. Therefore, countless people have seen the clip and will have heard this quote from Tsiaras:
The magic of the mechanisms inside each genetic structure saying exactly where that nerve cell should go– the complexity of these, the mathematical models of how these things are indeed done are beyond human comprehension. Even though I’m a mathematician, I look at this with a marvel of how did these instruction sets not make mistakes as they build what is us. It’s a mystery, its magic, its divinity.
The miracle of creation cannot be denied.
