Recently, I was told by a pro-life friend that it was difficult to determine when human life really begins. I confidently said, “at conception.” He told me some doctors claim conception takes a week. He was not referring to the time of implantation. Please comment. [N.N. Caronport, Sask.]
Procedures for in vitro fertilization have made it possible for scientists to observe, and time, the whole process of fertilization [conception] in petri dishes. It has been scientifically established as beyond doubt that once a human sperm has penetrated and fertilized a mature ovum, the chromosomes from the male and female combine to form a new and unique human life. This process takes about 24 hours, a fact that was confirmed by every international expert who gave evidence in 1986 before the Australian Senate Committee on the Human Experimentation Bill.
Conception therefore, is completed in approximately twenty-four hours. The term “moment of conception” [fertilization] is no longer valid; it is both imprecise and ambiguous, and, indeed it may be interpreted to be either the beginning or the culmination of the process of fertilization. Pro-lifers should therefore press for protection of life from the “inception of fertilization.” Such legal protection is essential if embryo experimentation is to be outlawed.
Would it not be more compassionate to abort a terribly sick and deformed child? After all it won’t have much of a life. [H.L. Oakville, Ontario]
Compassionate for whom? Are we talking about the baby? or is it the parents? Dr. Andre Hellegers of the Johns Hopkins Hospital once wrote in a paper on abortion: “While it is easier to feel that an abortion is being performed for the sake of the fetus, honesty requires us to recognize that we perform it for adults.” In other words, what is “convenient” suddenly becomes “compassionate”.
We cannot ask the pre born baby with congenital defects whether he or she would rather not be born, but we can study such children after birth. There is ample evidence to show that most possibly all of them not only enjoy their lives but bring joy to others. It is significant that the incidence of suicide is much less amongst the handicapped than in the general population.
The second part of your question raises the issue of “quality of life,” which brings us back to a concept of a “life unworthy of life.” This was the concept that led to the mass extermination centres of Nazi Germany. The Nazis began the killing with defective children, the newborn first, the older ones later. It does no harm to remind ourselves that one of the organizations which took the children to the killing centre was “The Charitable Transport for the Sick.”
Compassion and charity were totally missing.
In a previous column you mentioned that Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court had stated that Court’s rulings on abortion were not “evenhanded.” What exactly did she say, and when? (S.S. Barrie, Ontario)
Madame Justice Day O’Connor began her written dissent in Thornburgh, June 11, 1986 with this statement:
“This Court’s abortion decisions have already worked a major destruction in the Court’s constitutional jurisprudence…Today’s decision goes further, and makes it painfully clear that no legal rule or doctrine is safe from ad hoc nullification by this Court when an occasion for its application arises in a case involving state regulation of abortion. The permissible scope of abortion regulation is not the only constitutional issue on which this Court is divided, but—except when it comes to abortion—the Court has generally refused to let such disagreements, however longstanding or deeply felt, prevent it from evenhandedly applying un-controversial legal doctrines to cases that come before it.”
Justice Day O’Connor thus made it crystal clear that, in her opinion, the majority of judges on the U.S. Supreme Court put their pro-abortion bias ahead of “uncontroversial legal doctrines,” and she pulled no punches when she condemned their pro-abortion decision in Thornburgh. She concluded her dissent with these scathing words: “In my view, today’s decision makes bad constitutional law and bad procedural law.”
Have any countries or states which have passed liberal abortion laws ever reversed their stand? (C. P. North York, Ontario.)
New York State passed a law which was virtually for abortion on demand. Two years later, in May 1972, because the results of permissive abortion were so revolting, the State Legislature passed a bill repealing the liberal law and reinstating the former statute which banned all abortions except to save the mother’s life. Governor Rockefeller vetoed the bill. His veto could have been overturned by a two-thirds majority vote in the legislature but the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973 overturned all state laws against abortion.
Readers may know of other examples.
