My recent blog post War on Children produced a conversation. Here is an excerpt from one of the commenters:

“There is no “human being” until full bilateral synchronization [of the brain]. Please understand that. Please get that straight in your head. A human being can die. Before week 28 nothing can “die.” Period. So, if you want to use language like “kill” and “murder” then you must tell me, and everyone reading this, how you can kill something that cannot die…”

The author of this position then asked repeatedly, “Tell me, how can you kill something that cannot die?” as his trump.

So the arguments are:

A fetus is not alive until 28 weeks gestational age. (It is not a human being either?)

Before “brain synchronization”, it is not living, therefore it is not something which can die.

That baby in your belly moved because it was nothing more than “electrical impulses firing, causing movement… like firing shocks through a [dead] frog’s leg.”

This blogger equated death (the cessation of life in a previously living being) with the early stages of human development. No distinction was recognized even though a fetus meets every criteria for life and humanity. Blogger also would not define the terms of the discussion, particularly regarding whether the critical question was the fetus’ life/non-life, humanity/non-humanity, or sentience/ non-sentience.

Incomplete brain development = not living yet OR not human yet = we can dispose of it and it’s a morally neutral act.

 20 week fetus

What is this position really? What are all positions which pinpoint some arbitrary criteria which allows functional human adults to excuse the termination of millions of unborn human beings?

It is discrimination imposed upon some human beings based on their incomplete development.  It is a defense of legal termination based on inability, temporary handicap, or the incomplete growth process.

It is disqualifying still-developing children for life, even though if they were left to grow (not killed), they would become fully able.

Making termination of human fetuses legal up to a certain point in their development is exactly this.

In other words, we are killing the defenseless because they are defenseless.

Abortion culture sometimes uses pre-viability as a boundary for guilt-free termination.  A moving goalpost if there ever was one; and since it moves as science advances, it cannot have ever been an ethically-based position.

Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 case legalizing abortion, made fetal viability an important legal concept. The Supreme Court ruled that states cannot put the interests of a fetus ahead of the interests of the pregnant woman until the fetus is “viable.” ~ Slate

But why was viability ever the benchmark anyway?

While the unborn are weakest, while they are the most defenseless and vulnerable, while they need the most nurture…that is when we allow them to be eliminated. This is the opposite of Christian ethics, or even human ethics.

We are meant to protect most exactly those who need protection most.

In God’s design, babies are helpless for at least one good reason. Their dependency is supposed to elicit an instinctual response in adults, particularly females and more particularly mothers…for protectiveness and for the desire to nurture. It’s built into us.

We were designed to be the protectors of those helpless lives. Carrying those tiny lives within our bodies is supposed elicit obvious and intuitive impulses to protect. This is not altruism; it is not extraordinary but natural.

What we see now is a whole culture of  females denying those impulses to nurture, calling those impulses oppressive and disturbed. In favor of lateral peer dependence, they will purposely make themselves cool calculators who are just fine with ending the lives of the weakest of human beings.

Our culture has chosen a position which favors self-serving and arbitrary criteria for inclusion, and death as the default for those who fail to qualify. We kill the weak.