The more abortion debates center around babies developed enough to think and feel and resemble adorable newborns, the more pro-lifers gain a nigh-insurmountable advantage. The savvier pro-aborts clumsily try to change the subject or qualify that of course they’d allow abortions only for extreme medical circumstances late in pregnancy (which isn’t true, but that’s another article), and the few honest enough to admit they just don’t care rightly come across as monsters.
Often, however, intuition works against us when the discussion focuses on the earliest moments of pregnancy, in which the new human’s brain has yet to form and images of zygotes appear indistinguishable from any number of human cells that possess no moral worth independent of the person they constitute. Science tells us that the life of an individual human being begins with fertilization, Scripture tells us that human life is innately priceless, and ethics tell us that it is unjust to deprive anyone of his future, but for many, putting an apparent microscopic blob on the same level as themselves or their children is just too much of an abstraction to wrap their heads around.
It doesn’t help that liberal culture’s relativistic tendencies are fundamentally at odds with rational thinking. The left emphasizes emotionalism and appeals to people’s egos by telling them their feelings are authoritative guides to major moral and political questions. If it seems right to you, that’s all that matters.
This, obviously, is a terrible way to make decisions. That different people’s senses lead them to incompatible and contradictory conclusions is enough to prove its inadequacy to all but the most fanatical relativist, but still it persists, because it makes intellectually lazy people feel better about themselves and is a convenient rationalization to dismiss violence done to the unborn.
To help understand how the zygote’s appearance and development level don’t negate its biological humanity, let’s consider another scientific question, on the opposite end of the size scale, in which there’s a significant disconnect between scientific truth and the impression our unassisted senses leave us with. Take a look outside:
Does that look like the surface of a big sphere in a massive black void to you? Not to me. Let’s go a little higher. Still flat:
You’ve got to get somewhere around this high before the naked eye can begin to discern the Earth’s true shape:
Nobody (well, almost nobody) disputes that our planet is round anymore, because the true scientific fact of the matter is widely known. We answered the question through scientific analysis, not by glancing out our window and calling it a day. But if astronomy was governed by the same evidentiary standards that liberals use to conclude that zygotes aren’t live human beings, we’d all be flat-earthers. So remind me again: why do these people still claim a monopoly on the pro-science label?
