Wesley’s most recent book is Culture of Death: The Age of “Do Harm” Medicine, a warning about the dangers to patients of the modern bioethics movement.For many who first learned about the so-called heartbeat bills in national headlines, the push seemed unprecedented. Wesley has been recognized as one of America’s premier public intellectuals on bioethics by National Journal and has been honored by the Human Life Foundation as a “Great Defender of Life” for his work against suicide and euthanasia.
Wesley is a contributor to National Review and is the author of 14 books, in recent years focusing on human dignity, liberty, and equality. Smith is Chair and Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. Smith Chair and Senior Fellow, Center on Human Exceptionalism Wesley J. Photo credit: © auremar - .Ĭross-posted at The Corner. Some abortion supporters conflate these two different ideas to sow confusion - apparently because they believe admitting the embryo or fetus is a human life, that is, a human organism, and hence, a member of the human species, makes their policy advocacy challenges more difficult. It is a subjective value judgment or philosophical concept. Life is objective, the existence or nonexistence of which can be demonstrated by science. Strauss uses “life” and “person” as if they were interchangeable. Hence some will admit a fetus is a human life but claim he or she is not a “person,” and therefore possesses less or zero moral value. Whether that matters morally, and if so, how much, is a subjective question of values, morality, religion, ethics, philosophy, etc. Whether an eight-week gestated fetus is “alive” is beyond doubt. That’s basic objective science. If the living fetus is human, he or she is a human life. What does that even mean? Strauss’s thesis seems to be that when life begins is a matter of what one feels about the question.īut that’s not true. It renders the grayscale beginnings of life in black and white, in refutation of the fact that this is a mysterious process with many possible ends It’s hard to be unmoved by the coursing of blood through an embryo or fetus’ heart, something many women and men now bear witness to in the exam room, with our eyes, ears, and, yes, hearts. In the debate over life’s beginnings, the heartbeat is a metaphor, a visceral and potent symbol of life that some can’t help but interpret as proof of life itself. From “ When Does Life Begin? It’s Not So Simple“: Like in this Slate piece by Elissa Strauss that actually claims a beating heart isn’t necessarily proof of life.
Sometimes, the attempt to deny this scientific reality gets comical. Embryology textbooks tell us at the completion of fertilization. Which means that you and I are the same organism now that we were at that point in time when we consisted of one cell. Some people keep pretending that we don’t know when human life begins.
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