Planned Parenthood Chair: Zygotes Aren’t Aware They’re Human Begins
So personhood depends on…consciousness?
(CNSNews.com) – Kathleen Turner, actress and chairwoman of Planned Parenthood’s Board of Advocates, criticized “personhood” legislation, which defines life as beginning at conception and ending at natural death, and asked how a human embryo would know it had such personhood rights.
At the National Press Club on Wednesday, Turner spoke about reproductive rights and mocked the idea of a “personhood” law.
“And then we have the so-called ‘personhood’ bills,” she said. “Now these would give full legal rights to a zygote, at the moment sperm meets egg. Frankly, I have always wondered, ‘How do they know?’”
By this standard, I guess mentally disabled people or people in a coma don’t deserve life either since they aren’t conscious.
Which is, of course, ridiculous.
Of course life begins at conception. It not at conception, then when? What other point in the continuum of growth and development that begins at conception does life begin? Viability in the womb? How do we define that with advancements in medical science making unborn children viable outside the womb earlier and earlier? Is it some developmental stage? Do we say the baby is a child when it gets a heart beat? Or eyes? Or fingers?
That seems as arbitrary (and monstrous) as deciding a child doesn’t really represent a life until it knows how to walk or roll over.
That’s the problem with abortion policy in America. It’s based on politics, not science.
Tags: Abortion, planned parenthood
