On Monday, Rabbi Aaron Alexander took to the Huffington Post to put the latest face on a tired argument. Happily, he kept it short, so I’m going to break it down piece by piece. Though I’ve hesitated from doing so until this point, I’m going to reflect briefly on abortion. I am not going to […]
I recently had an interesting exchange with Ray P., a Secular Pro-Life member and scientist whose current project involves the study of gestational diabetes and insulin production. Of course, I’m thrilled to see an SPL member working to improve maternal health. But Ray has an ethical conundrum: many scientists in his field use cell lines […]
The Susan B. Anthony List is working with pro-life politicians to develop talking points about pregnancy from rape. The always reasonable Amanda Marcotte sees this as evidence of malfeasance, declaring: “The SBA List isn’t interested in discouraging Republican politicians from holding ugly, sexist beliefs about domestic and sexual violence. They’re just here to help politicians […]
Hydatidiform moles occur when an egg without a nucleus gets fertilized; this fertilized egg does not have the genetic code of a human organism and will never develop into an infant. Some argue, then, that fertilization isn’t a defining moment and that it’s incorrect to say fertilized eggs are human beings. The Life Training Institute wrote […]
In the never-ending debates over what it means to be a “person” (as distinct from a human being) I’ve seen many people claim that you cannot be a person unless you are viable, i.e. a fetus is not a person until the fetus can live outside the mother’s body. The first counterargument I usually hear […]
Given the impracticality of claiming a zygote is not a human, abortion proponents will typically explain that, while the zygote may be a human being, it is not a person. What is a person? Depends on who you ask. Some of the most common pro-choice claims are that you are not a person unless you are viable, […]
I have been active in the pro-life movement for about six years now. My boyfriend is not quite as active as I am, but he does come with me to marches, and he is a good listener as I bounce ideas off of him for SPL blog posts or I talk about some recent piece […]
Wonderful exploration by Kathryn Reed: I decided when I was thirteen that I was both an atheist and prolife. I became an atheist because I had no belief in a spiritual reality. I became prolife because my biology class taught a section about the development of the human embryo and fetus. I saw a human […]
Luis Zaffirini, who works for the National Right to Life Committee, has an excellent article on LifeNews.com today. The topic is a pro-abortion research study, which seeks to identify (and then, somehow, eliminate) the causes of stigma on abortion. The researchers noted five reasons abortion is stigmatized including the fact that scientific advances have “challenged […]
Leadership board member Michelle Z. shared this image, noting that it’s been circulating on Tumblr. These analogies only work if you avoid those pesky “difficult concepts” from science: concepts like fertilization, species classification, and biological development. Let’s start with the egg. They’re right: it isn’t a chicken, because it hasn’t been fertilized. Hens lay eggs […]
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