“Could a fetus lying in the womb be planning its future? The question comes
from the discovery that brain areas thought to be involved in introspection and
other aspects of consciousness are fully formed in newborn babies.”
These are the resting state networks (RSNs), AKA the “dark energy of the brain”,
which are active even when a person is asleep. One of them, the “default mode
network”, may be involved in thinking about the future.
‘Brain areas thought to be involved in introspection and other aspects of
consciousness are fully formed in newborn babies.’—article in
New Scientist, November 2010
What brought about this question was the research of David Edwards and colleagues
at Imperial College London,2
who scanned the brains of 70 babies, many of them premature, with MRI (co-invented
by creationist Raymond Damadian). They found that “RSNs for vision,
touch, movement and decision-making were largely complete by 40 weeks, as was the
default mode network.”
Naturally, this has implications for the pro-life issue, but not necessarily what
many people think.
Humanity of the unborn: is it the issue?
Some creationists have argued on the lines of: Whether the unborn is human is not
the issue. The main issue is that the Bible commands us not to murder.
This is fallacious. Murder by definition is intentionally taking an innocent3human life. So before
we can know if the command even applies in the first place, we must establish that
the subject is human. Indeed there is
overwhelming scientific and biblical evidence for this. For example, see
this Baby Steps video below, based on 4D (real time) ultrasound.
Baby Steps video from American Life League: Using 4D ultrasounds, the film
shows the baby in the womb from 8 weeks through to birth.
In fact, the humanity of the unborn is old news. For example, fetal surgery has
been performed for decades, and by definition treats the unborn as a patient.
I once had the privilege of sitting next to a fetal surgeon on an airplane, and
he described some of the fascinations. For example, he has operated on the fetal
heart, “about the size of a pecan.”
Edwards’ research is yet more evidence of pre-natal human life. But
even if the opposite were found, it would not prove that the baby was not
human. After all, adults in deep unconsciousness might not have any brain activity
involved with planning for the future, but it is wrong to kill them. The reason
is that they are still human beings.
The same sort of issue came up with a (disputed) study earlier this year claiming
that unborn babies don’t feel pain for the first 24 weeks. But if that means
it’s OK to kill them, then by the same reasoning it is permissible to kill
patients under anesthesia, and those with a rare disorder that makes them unable
to feel pain (Hereditary Sensory Autonomic Neuropathy (HSAN)). See
When does the unborn baby feel pain? And does it matter for abortion opposition?).
Pro-lifers should keep returning to this key issue—the humanity of
the unborn—when dealing with all the usual pro-abortion rhetoric, as shown
in Antidote to abortion
arguments. Many conversions from pro-abort to pro-life have resulted from
this one issue, as we have shown in
Refuting contrived pro-abortion arguments.
It was ultrasound evidence that convinced the former NARAL activist and abortionist
Dr Bernard Nathanson that abortion was wrong, even though for many years he remained
an atheist. His documentary on the abortion of an 11-week baby, Silent Scream,
has convinced many women not to abort their babies, e.g. “Erica”:
Dear Silent Scream Website,
I just wanted to write a quick note to say thank you. I was supposed to have an
abortion today and I was up all last night researching abortions on the internet.
I came upon your site and couldn’t stop thinking about it. It had a profound
effect on me.
I still went to the clinic and went through the blood testing and watched their
video….then came the ultrasound; I begged the nurse to let me see my baby;
I felt that I had to see. As soon as I saw my child on the ultrasound I knew I couldn’t
do it.
The clinic can absolutely NOT convince me that that living child inside me wasn’t
going to feel anything. I saw the heart beating, and he moved his little hands (almost
like a wave). I think God intervened and lent me a message that I was about to make
the biggest mistake of my life.
My nurse was very compassionate (which I thought was odd) I asked her for a picture
of my baby and she explained that she wasn’t allowed to do that. She also
explained that she wasn’t supposed to show me the ultrasound screen either.
Well, she broke the rules and gave me a picture anyway.
Thanks to the nurse at the clinic and to your video I made the right decision. I’ll
be having the baby in 7 months and am looking forward to meeting my little miracle
in person.
Thank you a million times over,
Erica
With this new evidence, it might mean that girls might reconsider abortion, knowing
that they’re not ‘just getting rid of it at the
fish stage’ but prematurely destroying the future of their baby even
as he/she might have been thinking/dreaming about it—perhaps even making plans.
And with this new evidence, it might mean that girls like Erica might reconsider
abortion, knowing that they’re not “just getting rid of it at the fish stage” but prematurely
destroying the future of their baby even as he/she might have been thinking/dreaming
about it—perhaps even making plans.
Another atheist who became a pro-lifer is Nat Hentoff. One influence he
cited was the inadvertent one by the ‘bioethicist’ Peter Singer:
“The pro-life groups were right about one thing, the location of the baby
inside or outside the womb cannot make much of a moral difference. We cannot coherently
hold it is alright to kill a fetus a week before birth, but as soon as the baby
is born everything must be done to keep it alive. The solution, however, …
is not to accept the pro-life view that the fetus is a human being with the same
moral status as yours or mine. The solution is the very opposite, to abandon the
idea that all human life is of equal worth.”
Hentoff accepted one premise, but argued the opposite: there is no difference but
location between babies before and after birth, but killing babies after birth is
wrong, therefore killing babies before birth is wrong. He
cited people like the black militant Rev. Jesse Jackson:
“Don’t let the pro-choicers convince you that a fetus isn’t a
human being. That’s how the whites dehumanized us … The first step
was to distort the image of us as human beings in order to justify what they wanted
to do—and not even feel they’d done anything wrong.”
Humanity of the unborn: necessary but not sufficient for pro-life
view
The above creationist misunderstanding seems to stem from what should be
a caricature of the moral argument for God. We are often accused of saying that
atheists can’t do good. No, what we say is: of course atheists can
be good without God, but that the whole idea of good and evil has no objective meaning
under their philosophy. See
Bomb-building vs. the biblical foundation. More recently, the Jewish
libertarian columnist Jeff Jacoby gave a lucid summary of the argument:
“Can people be decent and moral without believing in a God who commands us
to be good? Sure. There have always been kind and ethical nonbelievers. But how
many of them reason their way to kindness and ethics, and how many simply reflect
the moral expectations of the society in which they were raised?
“In our culture, even the most passionate atheist cannot help having been
influenced by the Judeo-Christian worldview that shaped Western civilization. …
“For in a world without God, there is no obvious difference between good and
evil. There is no way to prove that murder is wrong if there is no Creator who decrees
“Thou shalt not murder.” It certainly cannot be proved wrong by reason
alone. One might reason instead—as Lenin and Stalin and Mao reasoned—that
there is nothing wrong with murdering human beings by the millions if doing so advances
the Marxist cause. Or one might reason from observing nature that the way of the
world is for the strong to devour the weak—or that natural selection favors
the survival of the fittest by any means necessary, including the killing of the
less fit.
“It may seem obvious to us today that human life is precious and that the
weakest among us deserve special protection. Would we think so absent a moral tradition
stretching back to Sinai? It seemed obvious in classical antiquity that sickly babies
should be killed. …
“Reason is not enough. Only if there is a God who forbids murder is murder
definitively evil.”4
As shown above, because atheists can do good deeds (humanly
speaking), they can be convinced by the humanity of the unborn
to become pro-lifers.
But not all of them do good. E.g. the above-mentioned Peter Singer draws
the opposite conclusion to Hentoff: that infanticide is also permissible. At least
he is in the
good company of the current President of the USA.
For a historical precedent, Hentoff
cited Dr Leo Alexander (1905–1985), who was a chief medical adviser
at some of the Nuremberg trials of the Nazis. Alexander pointed out5 that the eugenics and euthanasia policies had “small
beginnings … the acceptance of the attitude … that there is such a
thing as life not worthy to be lived.” But after the camel had managed to
get its nose into the tent, it wasn’t long before its whole body was in, and
the human displaced. Alexander wrote:
“Gradually, the sphere of those to be included in this category was enlarged
to encompass the socially unproductive, the ideologically unwanted, the racially
unwanted and finally all non-Germans. But it is important to realize that the infinitely
small wedged-in lever from which this entire trend of mind received its impetus
was the attitude toward the nonrehabilitable sick.”
Hentoff likewise saw the danger of dehumanizing the unborn—not only wrong
in itself, but a dangerous slippery slope.
Proving the humanity of the unborn can convert an atheist to a pro-life
position—if he holds to a basically Judeo-Christian ethic of sanctity
of innocent human life. But Peter Singer, the Nazis and Communists are proof that
conceding humanity to a class of humans is not sufficient to protect them,
if they throw out this ethic.
The above shows that proving the humanity of the unborn can convert an
atheist to a pro-life position—if he holds to a basically Judeo-Christian
ethic of sanctity of innocent human life. But Singer, the Nazis and Communists are
proof that conceding humanity to a class of humans is not sufficient to
protect them, if they throw out this ethic. This is presumably what the above creationist
was trying to get across, although clumsily expressed.
Furthermore, the humanity of the unborn has long been known for millennia,
well before ultrasound and other modern scientific advances. For example, one of
the best-kept secrets of the anti-Christian MMM (Mendacious Mainstream Media) and
government educracy is that the founding mothers of the feminist movement were staunchly
pro-life. They denounced abortion as “child murder”, and argued that
if they were to object to treating women as disposable property, they should likewise
object to treating their unborn children that way (see
Abortion: an indispensable right or violence against women?).
Yet they had less scientific evidence for humanity the unborn than we have
now. Conversely, now that we have more evidence of its humanity, our cultural
gatekeepers are pro-abort—including most soi-disant feminists. The only
reason for the change is not advances in fetal science, but a replacement
of the Judeo-Christian sanctity of life ethic with an evolutionary ethic—if
such a term can even have a meaning.
Conclusion
In summary: there are two—and only two—issues to decide
the abortion debate, so it’s not so difficult:
Is the unborn child (‘fetus’) a human being?
If so, is it ever acceptable to kill the unborn?
This latest brain scan research on premature babies provides strong support for
an affirmative answer to (1). But this support was far from necessary: the case
was already overwhelming. But by its very nature, this cannot tell us anything about
(2): this is a moral question, not a scientific one.
Readers’ comments
Bob C., Australia, 9 December 2010
This, to me, is one of the clearest, succint articles on the tragic abortion issue I have read, reinforced as it is by the BabyStepsDVD. Keep up the good work. May God continue to guide you and bless you all at CMI.
Jim P., United States, 17 December 2010
Babies breathe amniotic fluid (in shallow breaths). Vocal cords are functional at 13 weeks. Babies come out crying as if they’ve been practicing for months. I suspect if one were to record fetal sounds and shift the frequency to compensate for the difference in density between amniotic fluid and air, one would discover that babies vocalize a great deal before they are born. Remember the impact whale songs had on the environmental movement in past decades? What impact would fetal songs have on our society? What impact would it have on a mother contemplating abortion if she could hear her unborn baby hum and coo, or even cry?
Helen G. A., Philippines, 17 December 2010
Once the egg is fertilized there is already life in it. it is naturally human because it came from human parents. they have all the right and dignity to live as one and be protected from harm from whatever forces that would endanger them. please let them live and be brought to life. give them the chance to live as you do. mothers if you don’t like the baby inside you please just for a while lend your womb to that baby inside you and once born give it to institutions that would take care of them and that would treat them well as humans. at least you are still good in the eyes of our creator because you gave that baby a chance to live. and we pro-lifers would thank you so much and will pray for you always. may God be with you when you decide … thank you!!
Sam W., Kenya, 20 December 2010
I’m certainly not a scientist and neither does my knowledge reach the heights I often read of here. Only one question for all bent on pro-choice. How does a non-living “thing” (for lack of a better word) suddenly change into “living”? If you could answer that, it’d be more miraculous than most of what the Bible carries as miracles. That answer alone, ruling out any morality, is adequate-to me-to put this matter to bed, once and for all.
Derek C. wrote: “This is an awesome website. As a Christian who’s finally just turning my life over to God (for good), I needed somewhere to look for answers when I had no one to ask.” Help keep the ‘awesome’ going!
