Hey “Faith Forum”: Life Begins at Conception
Last night on the “Faith and Politics” forum on CNN, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama separately answered questions on how they view religion’s role in politics. Watching Democrats talk politics is like watching Bill Lumbergh talk business. Many words are spoken, but little is said.
Here’s how one question might go down in a Democratic debate:
Chris Matthews: Senator Obama, what do you think of X?
Barack Obama: Well, first, we have to be very careful when we’re talking about X. To many people, X is a sensitive issue, and I only think it’s fair if we’re aware of those sensitive feelings people have. But if you’re asking my position on X, then I want to say that, first off, I think we can all agree that X is bad. [Pause as Democrats applaud]. No one wants X because it’s bad. Since it’s bad, I think we should try to instead do good things. Good things including the opposite of X. [Applause]. So what I will do as your President, is make specific plans and policies for avoiding X. I will sit down and talk with my advisors about possible ways we can approach X.
Chris Matthews: My leg is tingling.
Democrats give answers in debates like high school students who were caught half-asleep by their teacher.
The Democrats don’t really talk about what they believe, because what they really believe is horrible. It’s all too easy for Barack Obama to say “I would enter negotiations with X-Bad Country” than to admit how he would actually deal specifically with foreign policy issues. Anyone can say they’d like to negotiate.
Anyways, last night, the question of “When does life begin?” arose. Good, direct, pointed question. Hillary said this:
I believe that the potential for life begins at conception. I am a Methodist, as you know. My church has struggled with this issue. In fact, you can look at the Methodist Book of Discipline and see the contradiction and the challenge of trying to sort that very profound question out.
(Notice the insubstantial format: “X. Well, X is a very profound question. Many people have struggled in their answers to X. I have searched my heart for the answers to X….” and so on).
The life-at-conception question is, however, an interesting starting point for a good debate on abortion.
Here are three questions to ask yourself about abortion:
1. Does human life begin at conception?
2. If you answered “no” to question 1, when does it begin?
3. Why does it begin at that point as opposed to other points?
In my adventures, I haven’t found any consistent philosophy that satisfies anything but “life begins at conception.” There is simply no other valid line to be drawn at any point in the duration of pregnancy or even post-pregnancy. Think about it. Here are some arbitrary, post-conception points I think that people might bring up:
- Does life only begin when you can detect a heartbeat? No. About 11 weeks into a pregnancy, you can start hearing the baby’s heartbeat. While a functioning circulatory system is important for living things, to draw the line at “heartbeat” or “when we can hear the heartbeat” would ignore the infant’s brain function (also crucial for living things), and can’t be the sole decider.
- Does life only begin when the baby starts looking human? No. After about 12 weeks, the baby has arms, fingers, legs, toes, a circulatory system, nails, and a mouth. But where do you draw the line here? I think you can be a human being even if you don’t have fingernails.
- Does life only begin when the baby has brainwaves? No; at about Week 15 your baby’s brain can send its muscles signals through the nervous system, but if a brain was all you needed for life, we’d just be floating brains. After all, don’t they talk about how long creatures can “live” without its head?
- Does life only begin at birth? No; it’s an important event but you’d have to be nuts to believe that the baby’s life functions fundamentally change from going inside the womb to outside.
- Does life only begin when the umbillical cord is cut? This is when the baby starts surviving “on its own,” i.e. without a direct physical connection to its mother. But even then saying “surviving” admits that the baby was already “surviving” and alive before the cord was cut. All of its life functions remain the same before and after.
Since the answers to all of the above questions are “no,” it should follow that life begins at conception: the only time in the lifespan of a human being that it changes from fundamentally not a person into something else (”something else” from “not being a person” means being a person).
As I said, Democrats won’t directly address abortion like this, maybe because ultimately their position is that they support the legalization of killing babies. Needless to say, it’s pretty unpalatable, which might be why they give the most boring, question-avoiding answers possible. It makes for a worthless Faith in Politics Forum on CNN, and makes for two really, really bad candidates for President of the United States.
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