On September 7, 2021, Ms. Magazine published a piece by Carrie Baker titled “Media Repeat Junk Science Behind Abortion Ban Laws: Check the Science — There is No Heartbeat at Six Weeks.” Baker’s not-really-a-heartbeat piece followed the same general format as the many others before it: cite nothing but interviews and replace arguments with ambiguity. […]
On Sept 3 (2021) NPR published the article “The Texas Abortion Ban Hinges On ‘Fetal Heartbeat.’ Doctors Call That Misleading” by Selena Simmons-Duffin. In NPR’s tweet of the article, the description said “What an ultrasound detects in an embryo at 6 weeks is electrical activity from cells – not a heart.” Here I will explain […]
Through Secular Pro-life I frequently post content about how the human zygote is the first stage of a human being’s life cycle. Often when I point this fact out, people will suggest I’m strawmanning the pro-choice view. They assert that no one really denies the basic biology; the important issues to the abortion debate are […]
If you haven’t already, you should really read Biologists’ Consensus on ‘When Life Begins’, a dissertation by Steve Jacobs out of the University of Chicago. This blog post is going to be long, so here’s the summary: Most Americans think “When does human life begin?” is an important question that people deserve to know the answer […]
Image: Competing protest signs. One reads “Keep abortion safe and legal.” The other reads “Face it… abortion kills a person.” [This article originally appeared at The Fetal Position and is reprinted here with permission.] Occasionally a pro-choice person will give me a link to an article attempting to refute the idea that a new human organism begins […]
Definitions of “heartbeat.” To my knowledge there’s no unifying authoritative definition of “heartbeat.” Embryology textbooks do use the term. For example: “Blood flow begins during the fourth week, and heartbeats can be visualized by Doppler ultrasonography.” – The Developing Human, Moore et al, 10th Edition (2013) “The heartbeat is initiated around the twenty-first day, and […]
Recently a FB follower shared this post to our page: (Click to enlarge) The text reads, in part: This is what an embryo at 6 weeks looks like. There is no real heart beat because it’s heart isn’t nearly complete – they’re heart “vibrations” (vibrations are caused my cellular activity where the heart WILL be. […]
Today at the University of California, Berkeley, Pro-Life San Francisco is hosting the Let There Be Life Conference, which is designed to promote pro-life unity and education among Californians. Secular Pro-Life will be doing a speech on three pro-choice myths, including where those myths come from and exactly why they are misleading. We hope to post […]
When we say “life begins at conception,” we mean the human life cycle begins with the zygote. But often others think we are trying to say “people [morally relevant and valuable humans] begin at conception.” This is a philosophical claim, not a scientific one. So when others counter with “science can’t tell us when life begins” […]
The fetus is a living human organism. When I state this long-standing and (at least in the field of biology) undisputed fact, pro-choicers usually have one of three reactions: Reaction 1: They argue the point based on ignorance of basic biology. “A single cell is not an organism.” “A zygote is no different than your […]