Dean Barnett on abortion

Abortion —
Dean Barnett wrote a column for the Boston Globe that tries to make a secular argument against abortion. His basic point? He doesn't know when life begins and wants to err on the side of caution. What does he mean by life? Oh, he never says.

Why do people making an anti-abortion argument never bother to clarify what they're actually talking about at this crucial juncture of their argument? Here's a guess: Because doing so would make their position sound silly.

Actually, even without clarifying, Barnett does a pretty good job of that:

You might expect that since I'm pro-life, I would argue that life begins at conception. Actually, that's not quite right. In answering the question of when life begins, the best I can do is say "I don't know." Life may begin at conception. It may begin during pregnancy. Or it may begin at childbirth. While I have a feeling that life begins at conception, I certainly can't prove it.

The only people who can say with absolute certainty and total conviction when life begins do so as a matter of faith or belief, not as the inevitable result of a logical process. This is every bit as true for the pro-choice absolutists who feel that life begins only at birth as it is for people who believe that life begins at conception. Indeed, I would argue that the pro-choice absolutists rely much more on something unknown and unprovable than their pro-life sparring partners.

This is nothing new, but notice how he uses a much more pleasant term for people of his ilk ("pro-life", in contrast to those anti-life bastards) and for absolutists in the anti-abortion camp ("people who believe that life begins at contraception") than for his opponents ("pro-choice absolutists"). Eee gads! Absolutists! These pro-choice absolutists sure sound like scary people.

About the beginning of life: What kind of life? Every cell in your body is alive. A sperm is alive; an egg is alive; and surely a fertilized egg is alive. So is the mosquito you just swatted. So is a carrot or a yeast organism. The question isn't "Will something that's alive end up dead?" The relevant question, it seems to me, is "Will a person end up dead?" Is a fertilized egg a person? It sure doesn't look like a person to me. It has more in common with a cell in my lip than with Bill Murray (or any other human being). How about a blastula? Sure it's alive, but is it a person? Really? It has more in common with a soccer ball than even with a fish. Moving along, an embryo proceeds to take on some amphibious qualities and, as they say, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. It's life all along. Barnett need not fret over this issue. The issue worth fretting over is when is it human life. Not just human life in the sense that "human" is the best available adjective to describe it because, well, it comes from people. No, when is it a living human being?

Now I'll use a Barnett-ism: I don't know. But this is the question he should focus on, not a silly distraction of "When is it alive???"