Abortion presents itself as a religious, moral, economic and legal question. And curiously enough, it also essentially a scientific, biological question.
Is the child in utero a human being, a person? Or is a fetus non-human. Or sub-human matter, and if so, at what “point in time” does the fetus become a human being? Abortion decisions, the supreme court of the United States, as in the decision referred above, studiously avoided weighing the answers of contemporary science. The court determined (7-2) that an unborn child is an “it-thing” that does not become “fully human” until, in effect, “it” is born that as non-human or sub-human life “it” is solely the property of its mother, who may destroy “it” with liberty, whenever and whatever reasons she chooses. In short, the court ruled that the unborn child has no constitutional right life, or like all other innocent
…show more content…
From the moment of conception to the moment death, the biologists say, there is no point at which a living human organism is not a “human being”, be it in the uterine or infantile process of development, or in the process of disintegration called “dying”. Geneticists have now discovered that in the very instant the ovum is fertilised by the gamete, the new human life receives its entire genetic inheritance from the parents: the colour of eyes, hair, skin the shape of the nose, ears, mouth jaw- all the physical characteristics the child will be born with; as well as the intellectual and creative capacities that may lead in adult life to fame, fortune, or obscurity. No two inherited genetic structures are alike. No two humans. It is science, not theology, that has now determined that the unborn child, however tiny, helpless or “unviable”, is not only a human being, but an utterly unique human-in-being, in short a