By Dave Andrusko
Editor’s note. This first ran on December 21, 2022. I believe it’s worth another look.
There’s been a growing number of stories (which we have vigorously critiqued) that supposedly tell us that pro-abortionists have assumed the mantle of being “on the side of science.” That blatantly one-sided meme is as preposterous as it unscientific.
In truth the principles of our Movement are in harmony with basic biology and specifically human embryology. Each of us began our individual lives as human beings at conception when sperm and egg united to form a new single-celled organism (the zygote) — a member of our species at the earliest stage of development.
To argue against this you have to pretend, among other things, that human life doesn’t really begin until implantation, which is a political, not a biological, conclusion.
For example, when pro-abortion Law Prof. Mary Ziegler wrote (as she did in the New York Times that ”The Abortion Wars Have Become a Fight Over Science,” she is talking about fetal pain and the eminently defensible conclusion that abortion can cause “severe emotional disturbances” in some post-abortion women or increase the chances of “sterility.”
Here’s a perfect illustration of the pro-abortion insistence that time (and science and technological advances) stand still.
Ziegler off-handedly writes, “Some insisted that fetal viability came earlier than the 24-to-28-week time frame set in Roe,” as if to suggest that believing preemies can be saved earlier and earlier in pregnancy is equivalent to believing the earth is flat.
Tellingly, the link in her story is to a 1979 Supreme Court decision!
Has nothing happened in neonatal intensive care units in over 40+ years?!
Ziegler also opines
This year’s skirmish wasn’t actually unusual, however. Rather, it was revealing of a larger shift in the terms of the abortion debate. Over the past few decades, the abortion wars have become as much a fight about science and medicine as they are about the law and the Constitution.
But, of course.
We are far more capable than we were decades and decades ago of understanding the agony that a pain-capable child will experience as she is torn apart. We know a hundredfold more about the unborn child’s journey to birth and the remarkable interactions between mother and child.
The science of ultrasound, once extremely primitive, is now in 4-D and in color. We can see unborn children frolicking (so much for blobs of tissue).
We know that when it comes to abortion and anything touching on it, the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society and the American Psychological Association may be “well-established” but (contrary to Ziegler) they are anything but “non-partisan.”
A test of any scientific group’s commitment to the evidence will likely be how it handles the fact that chemical abortions can be reversed, if the second of the two drugs is not taken. If, as I suspect, resistance will only harden, no amount of evidence will ever convince pro-abortionists that this is not “junk science.”
Their resistance is equivalent to trying to make time stand still.
The truth is the “underlying science” is on our side and not our benighted opposition.