From California Medicine 113, no.3 (1970), reprinted in The Human Life Review 1, no.1 (1975): 103-4.
“…since the old ethic has not been fully displaced it has been necessary to separate the idea of abortion from the idea of killing, which continues to be socially abhorrent. The result has been a curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous whether intra- or extra-uterine until death. The very considerable semantic gymnastics which are required to rationalize abortion as anything but taking a human life would be ludicrous if they were not often put forth under socially impeccable auspices. It is suggested that this schizophrenic sort of subterfuge is necessary because while a new ethic is being accepted the old one has not yet been rejected.”
“…each of us has a unique beginning, the moment of conception…As soon as the twenty-three chromosomes carried by the sperm encounter the twenty-three chromosomes carried by the ovum, the whole information necessary and sufficient to spell out all the characteristics of the new being is gathered…(W)hen this information carried by the sperm and by the ovum has encountered each other, then a new human being is defined which has never occurred before and will never occur again…[the zygote, and the cells produced in the succeeding divisions] is not just simply a non-descript cell, or a “population” or loose “collection” of cells, but a very specialized individual, i.e., someone who will build himself according to his own rule.”
(As quoted in Linacre Quarterly, February, 1993)
Share on Facebook