Start of Life

Most campaigns for Congress receive candidate questionnaires from both Planned Parenthood and National Right to Life. In this case, the two organizations have a lot in common. They are both dedicated and use very similar tactics, i.e. name calling and "complex questions". They are both opposed to murder. Their main difference is their answers to the question, "When does a person become a person?".

Based on their questionnaires, the right-to-lifers claim that personhood begins with a fertilized egg. Planned parenthood insists that personhood doesn't begin until the embryo is well developed enough to survive outside the womb. The truth, as always, lies somewhere in the middle.

The right-to-lifers view suffers when you consider either cloning technology or in-vitro fertilization. Does a cell that can produce a zygote count as a person? It will grow if implanted in a uterus. How could you tell if you don't know that the cell was the product of cloning or in-vitro technology rather than the usual method? Cloning technology allows just about any cell to become a baby because each cell carries a full set of genes. Thus, insisting that any cell with the possibility of growing into a baby is a person becomes insisting that any cell at all is a person. The act of donating blood (for example) thus becomes mass murder, according to the right-to-lifers. Reductio ad absurdum

The pro-choice folks insist that the issue is a woman's right to control her body. That's fine, she has that right. However she does not have the right to murder a person. However, is insisting that another person not inhabit her body necessarily wrong or is it simply a case of trespassing?

Thus, the central question is, when does personhood begin, how do you know and how can you tell? Neither of the opposing factions have addressed how they answer this crucial question, other than as an unstated assumption.

Glenn's position is that he doesn't know. He doesn't claim to know how to tell or even what it means to say with any precision that something is or is not a "person". Worse, the current debate, while providing lots of heat and smoke, sheds very little light on the issue.

One aspect of this issue is tragic. There are quite a few cases where the right-to-life crowd has worked themselves up into such a frenzy that they have gone out and commited murder in the name of the sanctity of life. Bombings and sniper attacks on people and places that the right-to-life crowd says are involved in abortions are not unheard of. It is amazing that people can sink to this level of conservative hypocracy.