When Life Begins

We need to have a serious conversation about when life begins. As I’ve argued before, that question has very serious consequences for public policy. As we now see in the recent ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court, it threatens the opportunity of women who have fertility issues with the possibility of becoming pregnant through in vitro fertilization (IVF). This tragedy is a direct result of allowing religious doctrine to become standards of law contrary to the First Amendment. James Madison would be appalled. ¹

A big part of the current problem is that progressives have not articulated a coherent response to the conservative claim that life begins at conception other than to assert the right of women to make their own decisions on what is right for them. Thus the argument has been framed as those who are “pro-life” versus those who are “pro-choice.” While those on the left have protested that they are also pro-life, usually referring to everything from opposing the death penalty to supporting universal health care, rarely do they engage the question of when life begins. This is not just a a tactical error in the battle over abortion, it is a moral failure by not contributing to critical thinking on one of life’s biggest questions.

You have to give credit to the justices of the Alabama Supreme Court, they were at least consistent in their logic. If life begins at conception, then, of course that minuscule, multi-celled organism frozen in a test tube is, as they put it, an “extrauterine” child. Logical, but absurd. This is what happens when you insert religious doctrine into secular law. Once it became clear that the rights of “personhood” extended to fertilized eggs, whether in the uterine or out, IVF became legally untenable in Alabama. How could any institution deal with the legal ramifications of having hundreds of human beings stored in their freezers?

The Alabama legislature is hard at work at fixing this nightmare scenario, but note, they can only do so by either denying the premise of life beginning at conception or by giving IVF clinics some kind of “get out of jail for free” card. I wouldn’t bet on the former, and the latter can only be done if some of these “extrauterine” children are allowed to be “executed”, otherwise IVF simply cannot be done. Of course they won’t call it that, but you can’t have it both ways. Either they are, as the court declared, extrauterine children or life does not begin at conception. If the former, then every fertilized egg must be given a chance to be born, even if you know it is not viable and will only result in a miscarriage and could even endanger the life of the bearer. Otherwise to willfully destroy that fertilized egg would be to execute a human being. When the good legislators of Alabama work out this dilemma, I suspect their bill won’t be called “The Execution of Extrauterine Children Act”, but that at least would be consistent with the logic of their Supreme Court.

Chief Justice Tom Parker made it perfectly clear that the premise of the court’s decision was based on religious doctrine, stating in his concurring option, “Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself.” Parker continues, “Even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing His glory.”

As I made clear in my earlier piece, Driving Out of the Body in Texas, there are a variety of views on when life begins in world religions.² Even within Christianity, there are a variety of views. Though Christian conservatives like to think their views are consistent with the Bible, in fact, the Bible says very little on the topic and what it does say actually contradicts the idea of life beginning at conception. Chief Justice Parker cited one common text often misused in this debate from the prophet Jeremiah, stating in his conclusion, “We believe that each human being, from the moment of conception, is made in the image of God, created by Him to reflect His likeness…” Set aside for the moment the problematic issue of God’s likeness being associated with the male gender, the Biblical misuse comes when the Chief Justice associates this theological belief with the call of Jeremiah and the vote of the people of Alabama to place the rights of “unborn children” in their constitution, claiming, “It is as if the People of Alabama took what was spoken of the prophet Jeremiah and applied it to every unborn person in this state: ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you. Before you were born I sanctified you.’ Jeremiah 1:5 (NKJV)”

I do not pretend to be a scholar of the law, but I am trained in biblical interpretation and even took one full seminary course on the prophet Jeremiah. To construct that particular text as a basis for life beginning at conception is not just a simple misreading of the text, it is a classic example of misunderstanding the Bible as a whole. First, what should be obvious to anyone who has spent any time reading the Bible, this is a classic call story. Like the voice speaking to young Samuel in the temple (I Samuel 3) or the one speaking to blinded Paul on the road to Damascus (Acts 9), Jeremiah reports the call that he received from God to be a prophet to the nations. To turn this claim of divine appointment for one person into an assertion of human biology for all people is Biblical malpractice. Jeremiah is simply making the claim that he was called to this task even before he was born, nothing more and nothing less.

People living in Biblical times did not think of conception the way we do today. Read the genealogies of Jesus (Matthew 1, Luke 3). As is the case with all genealogies in scripture, women are seldom mentioned. Why? Aside from the patriarchal standards of the time, the simple fact is that there was no awareness of human eggs and ovaries. The assumption was that women were the fertile ground in which men planted their seed and hence children were descended from “the loins” of their fathers. Thus the author of Hebrews would claim that Levi “was still in the loins of his ancestors”, referring to Abraham and his descendants. (Hebrews 7:10)

Those like Chief Justice Parker like to claim that this country is founded on “Judeo-Christian” principles³. I would note first that most Jews I know today wish we would remove “Judeo” from that claim as they want nothing to do with most of the principles being so claimed. If those so called “Judeo-Christian” principles really do include those that Christianity inherited from the Jewish tradition, then one would expect that Jewish tradition would show some evidence of treating the “unborn child” as a full human being with all associated rights. It does not. To the contrary, as I laid out in my piece cited above, an injury that caused the loss of a fetus is not regarded as manslaughter in Hebrew scripture but as the loss of property. (Exodus 21:22-25)

What is abundantly clear in that scriptural tradition is that life is associated with the breath of God. The creation tradition, cited by Chief Justice Parker in his opinion, couldn’t be clearer: “Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” (Genesis 2:7) It is most telling that the Chief Justice did not cite this particular verse of the creation tradition for he surely knows that it at least calls into question the whole notion of life beginning at conception if not undermining it altogether.

It is my most sincerely held religious belief that we are, as Chief Justice also affirms, created in the image of God. And if we know anything about the creation process, creation does not happen in a single moment, but through a creative process of increasing complexity and beauty.⁴ Even if we take the Biblical story of creation as a literal account, which it surely is not, it is still a process of six days, and evidently six exhausting days at that, because it is followed by a day of rest. Why should we think human life would be created by anything less? Psalm 139:13-15 has this beautiful image of our evolution in the womb: “You knit me together in my mother’s womb… intricately woven in the depths of the earth.” I love that image of God knitting us into being, much the way my wife knit a baby blanket for our first grandchild, every stitch made with love.

I suspect many on the left are reluctant to make a case for life beginning at birth instead of conception because they also understand that human pregnancy, whether at one month or nine, involves something fundamentally more than a fertilized egg or a multi-celled organism. Upholding the sanctity of life, however, does not require that we be forced to choose between binary options. The beginning of life is truly something equally miraculous and mysterious. We should not shy from affirming the life at each stage of development from zygote (the fertilized egg) to a fully developed fetus. At each and every one of those moments life is beginning and therefore should be regarded with utmost care and respect. But the blanket is not complete until the last stitch has been cast off and taken from the knitting needle. So I argue for the beginning of life as a process rather than an event, which does not end until the child is born. It is at that point and only at that point that that which began months prior has now become a full human being, filled with the breath of God.

I fully expect the laws of the United States to be neutral on religious doctrine. It should neither promote my religious beliefs, those of Chief Justice Parker nor of anyone else. That is why we have the First Amendment. The ruling of the Alabama Supreme Court is not only a threat to reproductive health, by promoting one religious interpretation over another, it is a threat to religious freedom.

1. “Every new and successful example … of a perfect separation between ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance. And I have no doubt that every new example, will succeed, as every past one has done, in shewing that religion and Gov will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.” James Madison, Letter to Edward Livingston, July 10, 1822.) ↩︎
2. The Talmud, a collection of writings from the Jewish tradition, states clearly that “the fetus is not yet considered a human being” during the first 40 days of pregnancy. (Yevamot 69b) Maimonides, often regarded one of the greatest Jewish scholars of all time, writing in the 12th century said that capital punishment should be applied for all intentional murder with one exception: in cases of premature birth, the child is to be regarded as an abortion for 30 days and if killed during that time, capital punishment is not to be applied. Presumably Maimonides reasoned that a fetus needed a full 9 months to develop into a human being. And since a fetus at 8 months in the womb was not considered yet to be a full human being, so too would an infant born a month early. Regardless if one accepts the logic, the point here is that this exception by Maimonides clearly shows that he as well as most Jews then and now, saw the fetus as part of the woman’s body and not a separate person until birth, or in this case, not until 30 days after birth. ↩︎
3. It is noteworthy that Chief Justice Parker cites only Christian authors, such as Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin and shows no awareness whatsoever of anything other than the Christian tradition, and then, only of that portion of the Christian tradition which supports his arguments. ↩︎
4. Those familiar with process thought might recognize the influence here of Alfred North Whitehead. ↩︎

Photo credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knitting