Abortion brings dishonor to a society. This is why the abortion debate rages, because there are those who feel the loss of humanity’s honor in abortion, and those who do not have any personal honor and thus do not feel its loss.
Those with little honor have been carrying the day, and many of them have been resorting to secular science to bolster their arguments, claiming such nonsense as “a fetus feels no pain.” But fighting fire with fire, a letter in my local newspaper argued that since scientists have proven that life begins at conception, abortion is immoral. Not to be outdone, a liberal reader, mocking this pro-life use of science, none the less went on to use science as the moral basis for his pro-abortion stance.
At first, he tried to discount the use of science altogether in the abortion debate by falsely claiming that science is morally neutral. Science is not morally neutral. The whole practice of science is surrounded by moral behavior and rules, varying from what are moral means of carrying out experiments to how best to protect employees from the chemicals used in many science labs. Amoral science would be conducted on any subject, under any conditions, by any person, educated or not, which is clearly not how science is carried out. Science is bathed in morality even before facts are discovered, and once discovered, those facts become infused with even more morality when society decides to fund or apply them. Thus, when society goes from the morally neutral “induced abortion is possible,” to “the government shall protect the right to an abortion” and builds up laws and structures supporting this view, it makes a moral leap.
Of course, science has proven that life does indeed begin at conception, and this was an annoyance to our pro-abortion liberal. Thus, while acknowledging that supporters of abortion know an embryo is a potential human life—a scientific fact—our hapless liberal stated with moral authority heavy on his breath, that at least he and his enlightened friends could tell the moral difference between a “primitive” life that can’t survive outside the body and a real life (presumably his life is real while certain others are not). Here he has made a moral leap that he says he is not making, which is: because the fetus cannot survive outside of the body (a scientific fact), it can be killed (a moral decision).
The basic abortion disagreement in this debate lies in how two science facts are used: (1) life begins at conception and (2) the fetus is not viable outside of the womb. Using only fact #2, the immoral stance of our pro-abortion acquaintance becomes: since life can’t survive outside of the womb, we can kill it (and by the way, even when it can survive, we can kill it via late-term abortions), whereas using facts #1, #2, and millenniums of religious philosophies, the stance of pro-lifers becomes: since life begins at conception, and life-in-form is God’s highest creation, life in the womb should be protected and brought to fruition. The potential of life is honored, which in the end, brings honor to all life, including the life of Mr. Pro-abortion.
