Opinion | An Issue in the Abortion Debate: The Beginning of Human Life
Wendy Harvel
Austin, Texas
To the Editor:
In “When Does Life Start? A Post-Roe Conundrum,” the writer takes us on a beautiful tour through the many ways that human beings grapple with an important question. But it’s not the question asked in the headline.
Questioning when life begins today is like questioning the roundness of the earth. Science long ago settled that a new human life comes into being when egg meets sperm.
As a physician who cares for both fetuses and born humans, I have seen that a society unable — or unwilling — to wholeheartedly embrace the lives of its unborn children puts the value of every life up for debate: the aged, the infirm, the dependent. The question then becomes not “when does life begin?” but “who lives?,” “who dies?” and “who decides?” Such questions are not up for grabs in a just and merciful society.
Grazie Pozo Christie
Key Biscayne, Fla.
The writer is a senior fellow for The Catholic Association.
To the Editor:
A misconception behind the desire to identify the beginning of a human life is the idea that anything at all can happen instantaneously. However, there are no events in nature, only processes.
The idea of an event is a convenience to help us make sense of the world. But if we zoom in to a narrower time frame, everything proceeds by gradual change. The same is true of fertilization in humans. It requires a sequence of steps, the interruption of any of which causes fertilization to fail. And each of these steps is itself a sequence, and so on.
It is not the case that science is not able to identify the “moment” of conception. Such a moment fundamentally does not exist. One may ask, “When does a human life begin?” The answer is that life does not “begin,” it develops.
David A. Vaccari
Metuchen, N.J.
The writer is a professor of environmental biology.
To the Editor:
The writer asserts that the question “When does life begin?”, which was devised by the “Roe” court to justify legalizing abortion, is still unanswered. However, like the “Roe” majority, she asks this question while excluding contradicting existing scientific knowledge.
