FIC Blog

I’ve just returned from the March for Life in Washington, DC and it’s nearly 3 a.m. as I type this. But before I call it a night I’ll briefly address some of the pro-abortion blogs who linked to us yesterday.

Spazeboy writes:

And one for the Family Institute of Connecticut folks:

• I’m not pro-choice because I’m an atheist, but I did begin to question my religious beliefs because I was a pro-choice Christian.

The flip side of that, Spaze, is that many people are not pro-life because they are conservative Christians, but became conservative Christians because they first became pro-life. Bernard Nathanson, a co-founder of NARAL, became pro-life while still an atheist and only recently converted to Catholicism–in part because of the Church’s witness for the unborn. I know several people with similar stories. While holding no particular faith they came to an understanding of the unborn child’s humanity. And the realization that “conservative” religious folks stand almost alone in defending the human rights of the most defenseless members of our species led them into the faith.

Curiously, it’s the pro-abortionists who want to make this a debate about religion. That is the familiar tangent that one moonbat blogger went off on yesterday. But then again, why wouldn’t they? It is, after all, the pro-lifers that have science on our side.

And that the formation of an embryo marks the beginning of a new human life is, indeed, a matter of science. Embryology textbooks are clear on the matter. Some examples from a footnote in Ramesh Ponnuru’s The Party of Death:

1) “…the male and female sex cells or gametes, which will unite at fertilization to initiate the embryonic development of a new individual” (William J. Larsen, Human Embryology, 2001)

2) “Human development begins at fertilization…[the resulting zygote] marked the beginning of each of us as a unique individual.” (Moore and Persaud, The Developing Human, 1998)

3) “fertilization…is a critical landmark…because…a new, genetically distinct human organism is formed…” (O’Rahilly and Mueller, Human Embryology and Teratology, 2000)

4) In Gilbert, Developmental Biology (2000), Chapter 7 is entitled: “Fertilization: Beginning a New Organism.” First sentence reads: Fertilization is the process whereby two sex cells (gametes) fuse together to create a new individual…”

Finally, it’s worth asking the opposite question of the one pro-abortion bloggers posed to themselves yesterday: Why am I pro-life?

I’m pro-life because it’s wrong to use forceps to grab an unborn child in the second or third trimester and pull her, feet first, out of her mother except for the head and to then puncture the back of the child’s head, suck out her brains, crush her skull and pull the now-dead child’s head out of her mother. That is what happens in a partial-birth abortion.

I’m pro-life because the more common D&E abortion procedure, in which the child is dismembered in the womb, is just as disgusting.

I’m pro-life because, as my good friends at Feminists for Life and Silent No More will tell you, the pitting of women against their own children has led to the further exploitation of both–and is a betrayal of the true rights of women.

And I’m a conservative because the Left’s support for abortion exposed their claim to be the compassionate defenders of human rights for the stark shrieking fraud that it is.