Life Begins at the Beginning
(A Doctor Gives the Scientific Facts on When Life Begins)By Fritz Baumgartner, MD
April 12, 2005
Dear Friend,
We can approach abortion from many perspectives: Biological, embryological, genetic, philosophical, social and economic, at the very least. As for the first three – my approach as a scientist, physician, surgeon, and simply someone who finished medical school, is factual.
There is no more pivotal moment in the subsequent growth and development of a human being than when 23 chromosomes of the father join with 23 chromosomes of the mother to form a unique, 46-chromosomed individual, with a gender, who had previously simply not existed. Period. No debate.
There is no more appropriate moment to begin calling a human "human" than the moment of fertilization. And don't let anyone tell you otherwise, because it would be a degradation of factual embryology to say it would be any other moment. For example, some pro-abortion zealots and even, shockingly, some disingenuous physicians claim it is the moment of primitive notochord formation (nonsense!) or, even more absurdly, the moment of implantation. (It defies sanity to claim that the implantation of a developing blastocyst onto a uterine wall defines humanity more than does the completion of an entirely new DNA map, which defines a new organism's existence).
And to say that "size" is a determinant of humanity, of course, is an unscientific reason to deny an embryo his or her human status. In any event, it is an embryological reality, which no embryology textbook on earth denies, that at the moment of fertilization a new human being is formed.
Following below is some information about some of the less noble ideologies of my colleagues in medicine as they pertain to defining humanity and defending abortion. I hope it helps you refute pro-abortion lies.
Abortion is violence
Some people muse whether modern-day abortion is as bad as the Holocaust genocide of the Nazis. What is our answer?
Looking at numbers alone, we are now, in 2005, comparing 44 million surgically aborted babies in the USA alone (not even considering the babies who die by pharmaceutical methods like the Pill, RU486, DepoProvera), to 6 million Jews in Europe. The evil rationale of the Holocaust was racial hatred -- the furthering of an “Aryan race†and genocide against Jews. The rationale of our modern Holocaust, by the very admission of pro-abortion groups, is primarily convenience.
The vocation of medicine and the vocation of motherhood are both profoundly sacred and should teach us that human life is of immense value. Abortion hijacks the vocations of motherhood and medicine and distorts them into something unrecognizable. Abortion takes ordinary pregnant mothers and makes them accomplices in – literally – murder. When human life is thus cheapened, we all lose. As I wrote in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology,
"Modern American society has a strange ambivalence to violence and death, on the one hand expressing horror at high school massacres yet on the other hand perhaps merely shrugging in discomfort at the willful termination of early human life to the tune of tens of millions. The roots of this ambivalence lie in convenience, self-centeredness, and our national confusion regarding legitimate versus illegitimate 'choice.' Teenagers intuitively sense phoniness and hypocrisy and may have more trouble than adults in reconciling this apparent paradox, which seems so unnatural to the innocent mind yet on the other hand is almost taken for granted by society and, sadly, by medicine. As Mother Teresa of Calcutta said, ‘If we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill each other?…Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want…’ " (1)
Hippocratic Oath was anti-abortion
When does life begin?
Some people claim that our human lives really do not begin at fertilization, and that a more realistic time for the dignity of "humanity" to be imparted on a growing blastocyst-embryo would be about a week after fertilization, about the time of implantation.
It does not change things that in centuries past, some great Catholic theologians and philosophers differed on when precisely a biological entity becomes infused with a human soul. St. Thomas Aquinas, using the limited scientific knowledge of the 13th century, followed Aristotle that the conception of a male child was completed at day 40, and that of the female child at the 90th day, with replacement of the embryo's “nutritive soul†by a human soul. The Venerable Maria de Agreda, a 17th-century visionary, wrote that human "ensoulment" occurs at different times for boys and girls, and that it occurs at a time later than fertilization.
I am not a philosopher or theologian but a student of medicine and surgery. I can speak to you with authority that from a pure, unadulterated biological and embryological standpoint, there is no greater pivotal moment in our growth and development than when 23 chromosomes from our father join with 23 chromosomes from our mother to form a unique, new biologic entity who heretofore simply had not existed.
This new biological individual is complete, has a gender, and is fully and uniquely programmed and equipped to grow and develop and change until death. All he or she needs is nutrition and a warm place to grow. To say that an embryo has the "potential" to become a human being is biologically and technically imprecise – and dangerous.
Perhaps even more dangerous is the concept that it is not a precise moment, but a gradation of human worth. With this model, a preborn baby at 3 months is somewhat of a human being, but a newborn is more of a human being.
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