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When Does Life Begin

Frances Kissling

Another anti-abortion law is about to go into effect in Missouri. Once again, a state legislature thinks it can settle a question that no philosopher, lawyer scientist or other expert has ever been able to figure out. “The life of each human being begins at conception,” according to Senate Bill 793, which will add new regulations to the state’s 24-hour informed consent law for abortions. “Abortion will terminate the life of a separate, unique, living human being.”
Those words will be displayed “prominently” on brochures that abortion providers will be required to hand out to every woman seeking the procedure, reports StLouisToday.com

The site adds that providers will need to display that information even if they don’t agree with the “Christian position.” In that brief phrase the most common misunderstanding about abortion is presented as fact. Of course, they meant to say the “Catholic” position and even that is wrong. The best kept secret about Catholicism and abortion is that the Catholic view of when the fetus becomes a person is precisely the same as that asserted in Roe v. Wade. Whatever definition one wants to posit about fetal personhood, the fact is nobody knows. To paraphrase Roe, the justices declared that science, law, philosophy and theology had not been able to answer this question and neither could the Supreme Court. If you read various Catholic documents, the same opinion emerges. Over the centuries theologians and popes have suggested when they think God might confer personhood on the fetus, and they have come up with different answers. When the fetus first moves, when it is 40 days old if it is a boy or 80 days old if it is a girl, when it is viable, when it can no longer split in two and become twins. But in the end the church says what the court says “We don’t know.” Of course the similarity stops there. The court says we do know that women are persons and therefore we will leave it to each of them to decide what they think about the fetus and what they think about giving their body over to its development. The church says, even if we don’t know, women are required to treat the fetus from the moment of conception as if it were a person and make whatever sacrifices, including their life, to enable it to become a person.

No other human being is required to risk their life for another. To do so is considered crazy or heroic. A parent need not give a kidney to a dying child. A potential soldier can object conscientiously to risking her or his life in war. But, we are told, a pregnant woman has no say in defending her life in pregnancy.

In large part, legislators and priests, in fact most of us, never think about what we consider “natural” or “normal” in terms of women and gestation. For most of history, pregnancy and death were very closely related. Even today, every pregnancy carries the risk of dying for the woman. In the developing world, between 350,000 and 500,000 women die each year giving birth or dring pregnancy.

Even normal pregnancy involve, fatigue, excessively high heart stress, changes in hormones and blood supply, the risk of temporary diabetes, and a long list of other “normal” changes.

Is it not time to focus at least to the same extent on what pregnancy means for the person whose body is occupied by the fetus as on the fetus? Is it not time to recognize that the woman gets to consent to this visitation and that coercing her into providing her body for another “being” is not a routine event, but an heroic gift. A gift that must be freely offered?

18 thoughts on When Does Life Begin

  1. I have learned over time that if men can’t control what they wish among other men, they’ll go for the next best thing and seek to control the affairs of a woman.

  2. An issue I have besides from the horrific idea that women should be denied bodily autonomy to favor a potential child (as if all pregnancies were viable) is the misinformed idea that life begins at conception.

    It does not.

    Reality says that human life comes only from human life, from living egg and sperm.

    Perhaps it would be disingenuous, but I’d like to see pro-forced-birthers defend the rights of every potential child that could exist if only every sperm cell could unite with every egg. But then they are the ones drawing an arbitrary line that says life “begins” at conception.

  3. Is it not time to recognize that the woman gets to consent to this visitation and that coercing her into providing her body for another “being” is not a routine event, but an heroic gift.

    Exactly why the question of when life begins is a complete red herring. No person is required to host another human being inside their body. When arguing over abortion I refuse to engage this question. It’s irrelevant. If life begins at conception, a person is still has the right to refuse to allow their body to be used. If life begins at quickening (as was the belief for most of USian history), a person still has the right to refuse to allow their body to be use.

    As an aside…you might consider modifying the above references to women to include others (for example trans men) who often get erased in these discussions of reproductive rights.

  4. I was pro-life when I based my position on abortion on the personhood of the fetus (and the reason I believe a fetus is a person, is that there is nothing non-arbitrary that can define what a person is). I am pro-choice now that I base my position on the woman’s right to bodily autonomy.

  5. I’m reading “American Taliban” right now, and there’s a bit in there discussing the rise of a newly vocal secessionist movement making declarations about sovereign statehood, very like the sovereign citizen nonsense that sprang up during the Clinton administration.

    I find it painfully ironic that there’s such strong overlap between the demographics of people who think that states should be sovereign and (some male) citizens should be sovereign, and the people who think that governments should have the right to compel a woman to continue a pregnancy that either threatens her health or that she doesn’t want.

    They’ve been busy trying to turn every pregnancy into a forced organ donation in the most dehumanizing ways.

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  7. They can spew all the anti-abortion propaganda they want. It’s a fucking waste of money to force doctors to produce these brochures. Being alive means shit. Bacteria are alive and I don’t see anyone crying cause I wipe my counter off with bleach water. Poor little unique bacteria.

    Nixon should have vetoed this money wasting bill, and he’s losing my vote if he runs for re-election. He can cut student’s scholarships and the rural broadband expansion but he won’t cut this money-wasting time-wasting (what do we pay these politicians for?) piece of propaganda drivel?

  8. “Whatever definition one wants to posit about fetal personhood, the fact is nobody knows.”

    And the bottom line is, if it depends on my body, blood, nutrients to survive for however long and I’ll have to risk life and limb to give birth to it, and choose not to, then I have a right to terminate, murder, abort, or whatever anyone wants to call it. The pro-choice movement needs to bring the discussion back to the woman carrying the fetus. I mean, the anti-choice/anti-women crowd had been so good a dehumanizing women and focusing solely on the “poor little baby” you would think at the moment of conception, the fetus already has a binky in its mouth and is wrapped in blanky.

  9. Separate:
    adj [ˈsɛprɪt ˈsɛpərɪt]
    1. existing or considered independently a separate problem
    2. disunited or apart
    3. set apart from the main body or mass
    4. distinct, individual, or particular
    5. solitary or withdrawn
    6. (Christianity / Ecclesiastical Terms) (sometimes capital) designating or relating to a Church or similar institution that has ceased to have associations with an original parent organization
    [from Latin sēparāre, from sē- apart + parāre to obtain]
    separately  adv
    separateness  n

    adj.
    1. Being the only one of its kind: the unique existing example of Donne’s handwriting.
    2. Without an equal or equivalent; unparalleled.
    3.
    a. Characteristic of a particular category, condition, or locality: a problem unique to coastal areas.
    b. Informal Unusual; extraordinary: spoke with a unique accent.

    “you keep using [these] word[s]. I do not think [they] mean what you think [they] mean.

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  12. I agree with Kristen. You get nowhere arguing that we don’t know when it is that an embryo becomes a person, because it’s a *potential* person from conception and a pregnant woman who’s thinking of it as her little baby will mourn its death as if it was, in fact, a baby. The real point is that we are not obligated to keep other people alive with our own bodies even if it is our “fault” that they need that support.

    I like the following thought experiment. “A man and his pregnant wife are in a car crash. When the man wakes up, he’s told that his pregnant wife has died, but the doctors were able to transplant her uterus into his body, along with a hormone pump to keep the pregnancy going. The hormones will make him very sick, and he’ll require a surgical c-section at the end, and he might even die, but he should be happy to make this sacrifice to save his baby. The man does not want to suffer the illness that the hormones will cause him, and he certainly doesn’t want to die; does he have the right to demand that the uterus be removed?” Because that strips the argument down to naked sexism — people attempt to argue at that point that he has the right because the uterus being in him isn’t “natural”, but if the important thing is the life of the fetus, why would it being “natural” or not matter? All that matters is the baby, right?

    If they do respond by saying no, he has no right to remove the uterus, then you ask, “So, if a man gets a woman pregnant and the pregnancy is life-threatening to her, would you be in favor of forcing him to undergo surgery to accept the transfer of her uterus, if his chance of surviving the pregnancy and bringing the baby to term is better than hers?” Then a *lot* of “well, it’s morally worse to actively do something to someone than to passively allow something to happen, therefore no” handwaving comes in, but at this point you point out that if the survival of the baby is your primary concern, then the fact that the man has a better chance of bringing the baby to term alive than the woman does should mean that you are morally compelled to strap him down to a table, cut him open, and transfer that uterus, because that gives the baby the best chance for survival, and if you passively do nothing then mother and baby both die. At which point you get “Well, then that’s God’s will,” at which point you point out that cancer is also God’s will by that definition, so are they suggesting that no diseases should be treated, ever? And by the way, if they are wearing glasses, shouldn’t they remove them and walk around half-blind because it’s God’s will?

  14. “Is it not time to recognize that the woman gets to consent to this visitation and that coercing her into providing her body for another “being” is not a routine event, but an heroic gift. A gift that must be freely offered?”

    THIS a MILLION TIMES THIS, the more anyone waters down the significance of pregnancy the fact that it isn’t some easy peasy simple little thing to endure the more weight goes behind bodily autonomy. BEcause as you’ve said, no one knows when life starts, and even if that life relies on you base don your own uncoerced actions the fact is that reliance can be LIFE THREATENING TO YOU and noe should be forced to be ANYONE’s hero. Parents aren’t forced to give organs, blood, or marrow to ensure living born children survive, why should mothers or fathers be forced to sacrifice their bodies for UNborn children? Very simple question and gets to the crux of the argument without the red herrings, pink elephants etc of the when does life starts arguments.

  15. Somehow it has slipped past most people that the definition of when life begins in the womb is a religious issue, and that this law is one more way that we are becoming the United States of Christianity.

  16. “Being alive means shit. Bacteria are alive and I don’t see anyone crying cause I wipe my counter off with bleach water. Poor little unique bacteria. ”

    BINGO. The issue is not when “life begins”. The issue is individuality – when does the foetus, becaome a legally separate individual, with zir own legal rights. The whole issue of individuality is problematic and relatively new – basically no one much cared on a broad scale before the Reformation – and our civilization is still working out the details. So how about not brutalizing people in the meantime?

    And the law is unsettled. If someone murders a pregnant woman, ze’s often charged with two murders. That’s a conflict we haven’t worked out. So we just have to live with it for now. So in the meantime why not just treat pregnant women compassionately?

    “Somehow it has slipped past most people that the definition of when life begins in the womb is a religious issue,…”

    It’s very much a legal issue, see the double murder example above. The fact that it is also a religious one for some, though not all religious people, should have no weight in the discussion. The religious arguments exist; they just carry no weight.

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