The non-"Right" to Life and Abortion

As I re-read my last post, I thought, "Oops! I've stepped in a big pile of it now!" Because in my last post I stated that I did not think that you had a "right" to life (but you do have a right to live; they don't mean the same thing), and I'm sure that some readers are now thinking that I am in favor of abortion. Sorry to disappoint you, but just because I don't believe there is a "right" to life doesn't mean I am pro-abortion. The bigger question that is often argued in this regard is when does life begin. But even that is the wrong question, especially for those opposed to abortion, because the answer is not at the moment of conception.

Life does not begin at the moment of conception, because to accept this argument implies that the ovum and the spermatocyte that actually commit the act of conception are not previously alive. And they most certainly are alive. And the cells that made those cells were also previously alive, as were the cells that made those cells, and the cells before them, and the cells before them, and so on and so on and so on.......

From a scientific point of view, life began on this planet Earth about 3 1/2 to 4 billion years ago, and every living cell on this planet can trace its ancestry back to that original act of life-generation in an unbroken chain of living cells. So when conception occurs, no new life is created. But what does happen?

At the moment of conception, a new combination of human genes occurs, one that has never existed before in the history of Earthly life and will probably never exist again. That one cell contains all the information necessary to build another unique human being. So what happens is not the creation of new life, but the creation of a unique genetic combination -- a new individual human being.

When it grows, it will become recognizably a person. When it is an adult, it will contain no more genetic information than it did in that unicellular state -- it will simply have more copies of that information. When he was a child, he was smaller, but he was a person; when he was smaller still he was a fetus and before that a single fertilized conceptus -- but he was still a person, with all the rights and privileges our laws and customs accord to each individual person.

When you kill an adult human, you destroy every copy of his or her unique combination of genes. We also call this murder. So basically, murder scientifically is the destruction of all of the copies of the unique genetic combination that spells out a unique individual. When an abortion is performed, all the copies of the unique genetic combination of that fetal person are destroyed. From a scientific point of view, only one conclusion can be reached:

Abortion is murder.

Please note that although I credited (appropriately) God in giving us life in my last post, I did not mention God once in this argument. My personal views are that abortion is reprehensible on religious grounds, but also on secular grounds as well. The pro-life/anti-abortion crowd (pick your label) is never going to win their argument as long as they argue religion and the pro-abortion/anti-life crowd keep arguing rights and "choice". One side or the other needs to take on the other on the opponent's playing field. A scientific definition of abortion as murder does just that, and is difficult to counter. Though it would be interesting to see someone try to come up with a religious argument that supports abortion.