Posted by
Jonathan on Sunday, December 10, 2006 4:11:08 PM
If your cable system offers the National Geographic Channel, don't miss the premiere of Animals in the Womb
tonight at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time. The producers of this show have
used state-of-the art visual effects, computer graphics and real-time
"4-D ultrasound" imagery to produce absolutely stunning pictures of how
elephants, dogs and dolphins develop in the womb.
We're all familiar with photographs of humans in utero.
But seeing developing animals in such detail is something new.
Watching a 250 pound baby elephant grow over 22 months from an egg
smaller than a grain of sand is awe inspiring. Whether you view the
process as God's handiwork or the end result of a billion years of
selective evolution, the complexity and perfection of the process is
humbling.
I don't expect that these pictures will have a significant impact on
the abortion debate. That would be too much to hope for. But they
also serve as a powerful reminder of how closely humans are related to
the other creatures on this planet, and indeed, how all life on Earth
is interconnected. Understanding this will be crucial for humanity's
survival in the centuries ahead.
Related: Colin Bower at New English Review
offers a stinging rebuke to the U.S. Supreme Court and all the
feminists who claim to know when a fertilized egg becomes a human
being. The money quote:
Discarding for a moment the view which has it that the
actual life of a newly fertilised egg is already human life, or the
even more extreme position that the potential life of an
about-to-be-fertilised egg is also already human, and assuming that you
cannot call a
fertilised egg human life, but you can call the baby that issues from
the womb some nine months later human life, and knowing that most of us
agree that the gratuitous taking of human life is murder, the moral
challenge of abortion should be easy to adjudicate. Decide at what
point non-human life becomes human life, and let that be the moment critique before which abortion is abortion, and after which abortion is murder.
Of course, the problem is that we can’t. At some stage on its journey
through time from being a single celled zygote to being a multi celled
foetus, an organism becomes a human being. We can’t say when, nor will
we ever be able to. We are defeated not by moral complexity, but by
metaphysics.
On the other hand, my Jewish grandmother does know when a fetus becomes viable: when it graduates from medical school.