Why Pro-Life?/What’s the Difference Between Egg, Sperm, Embryo, and Fetus?

From Gospel Translations

Two years before abortion was legalized in America, a pro-choice advocate instructed nurses in a prominent medical journal, “Through public conditioning, use of language, concepts and laws, the idea of abortion can be separated from the idea of killing.”^[1] The same year a Los Angeles symposium offered this training: “If you say, ‘Suck out the baby,’ you may easily generate or increase trauma; say instead, ‘Empty the uterus,’ or ‘We will scrape the lining of the uterus,’ but never, ‘We will scrape away the baby.’”^[2]

Language isn’t just the expression of minds but the molder of minds. How words are used influences our receptivity to an idea—even an idea that, communicated in straightforward terms, would be abhorrent.

Words that focus on the pregnancy and the uterus draw attention away from the person residing in the uterus. But no matter how we say it, “evacuating the uterus” or “terminating a pregnancy” is taking a human life.

One pro-life feminist says, “Pro-lifers don’t object to terminating pregnancies. Pregnancies are only supposed to last a short while.We favor terminating them at around nine months. The objection is to killing children.”^[3]

WHAT DOES FETUS MEAN?

Like toddler and adolescent, the terms embryo and fetus don’t refer to nonhumans but to humans at particular stages of development. Fetus is a Latin word variously translated “offspring,” “young one,” or “little child.”

It’s scientifically inaccurate to say a human embryo or a fetus is not a human being simply because he’s at an earlier stage of development than an infant. This is like saying that a toddler isn’t a human being because he’s not yet an adolescent. One of my daughters is two years older than the other. Does this mean she’s two years better? Does someone become more human as they get bigger? If so, then adults are more human than children, and football players are more human than jockeys. Something nonhuman doesn’t become human by getting older and bigger; whatever is human is human from the beginning.

IS EGG OR SPERM A PERSON?

Carl Sagan ridiculed abortion opponents by asking, “Why isn’t it murder to destroy a sperm or an egg?”^[4] The answer, as every scientist should know, is that there is a fundamental difference between sperm and unfertilized eggs on the one hand, and fertilized eggs or zygotes on the other.

Like cells of one’s hair or heart, neither egg nor sperm has the capacity to become other than what it is. But when egg and sperm are joined, a new, dynamic, and genetically unique human life begins. This life is neither sperm nor egg, nor a simple combination of both. A fertilized egg is a newly conceived human being. It’s a person,with a life of its own, on a rapid pace of self-directed development. From the instant of fertilization, that first single cell contains the entire genetic blueprint in all its complexity. This accounts for every detail of human development, including the child’s sex, hair and eye color, height, and skin tone.^[5] Take that single cell of the just conceived zygote, put it next to a chimpanzee cell, and “a geneticist could easily identify the human. Its humanity is already that strikingly apparent.”^[6]

Product of conception, or POC, is a common depersonalization of the unborn child. In reality, the infant, the ten-year-old, and the adult are all “products of conception,” no more nor less than the fetus. As the product of a horse’s conception is always a horse, the product of human conception is always a human.

The debate about embryonic stem cells is an example of semantic power. Stem cells are versatile master cells from which a variety of tissues and organs develop. Considered prime materials for biomedical research, they’re available from benign human sources, including consenting adults, umbilical cord blood, and placentas. But many scientists are determined to use stem cells from embryonic human babies, who lose their lives in the harvesting. This ethical debate has serious implications for how we view human beings and whether they’re expendable to serve others.^[7]

Interestingly, the National Institute of Health found that the public was reacting against “human embryonic stem cell research,” destroying human embryos by experimentation. So the NIH chose a new term to describe exactly the same thing: “human pluripotent stem cell research.” The new term masks the reality that human embryos are the objects of experimentation.^[8] Rather than discontinue an unethical procedure, they found another name.

NO DOUBTS

If human cloning ever succeeds, a person would enter the life continuum at a point after conception. This would do nothing to change their human status. It’s a person’s presence on the human life continuum, not how they arrived there, that matters.

Dr. Thomas Hilgers states, “No individual living body can ‘become’ a person unless it already is a person. No living being can become anything other than what it already essentially is.”^[9]

Abortion providers have become more direct in admitting what happens in an abortion. Dr.Warren Hern, who teaches doctors how to perform abortions, describes his work:

I began an abortion on a young woman who was 17 weeks pregnant…. Then I inserted my forceps into the uterus and applied them to the head of the fetus,which was still alive, since fetal injection is not done at that stage of pregnancy. I closed the forceps, crushing the skull of the fetus, and withdrew the forceps. The fetus, now dead, slid out more or less intact.^[10]

This man, who has dedicated his life to performing abortions and teaching others how to do them, has absolutely no doubt that abortion kills a baby.

Do you know something he doesn’t?

1. ↑ Leonide M. Tanner, ed., “Developing Professional Parameters: Nursing and Social Work Roles in the Care of the Induced Abortion Patient,” Clinical Obstetrics and Gynecology 14fckLR(December 1971): 1271.
2. ↑ Paul Marx, The Death Peddlers: War on the Unborn (Collegeville, MN: St. John’s University Press, 1971), 21.
3. ↑ Feminists for Life Debate Handbook (Kansas City, MO: Feminists for Life of America, n.d.), 3.
4. ↑ Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, “Is It Possible to Be Pro-Life and Pro-Choice?” Parade, 22 April 1990, 4.
5. ↑ The First Nine Months (Colorado Springs: Focus on the Family), 3.
6. ↑ Preview of a Birth (Norcross, GA: Human Development Resource Center, 1991), 4.
7. ↑ See Scott Klusendorf, “Harvesting the Unborn: The Ethics of Embryo Stem Cell Research,” www.str.org/free/bioethics/harvest. pdf.
8. ↑ “Deadline Extended for Comment to NIH on Stem Cells Harvesting,” Prolife Infonet, 31 January 2000.
9. ↑ Thomas W. Hilgers, Dennis J. Horan and David Mall, eds., New Perspectives on Human Abortion (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America Inc./Aletheia Books, 1981), 351.
10. ↑ Slate: Medical Examiner, “Did I Violate the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban? A Doctor Ponders a New Era of Prosecution,” by Dr.Warren M. Hern, October 22, 2003; http://slate.msn.com/id/2090215.