- Life begins at birth, when the baby has passed down the birth canal and has drawn its first breath
- Life begins at viability. This is the stage that the baby could survive outside the womb if it was born prematurely and this is currently 21 weeks into pregnancy in the UK
- Life begins at conception. This means at the very moment of conception when the sperm unites with the ovum.
As soon as a human life exists it has the right to live and to have the protection of the law.
The problem is that different people believe different things. People believe that the embryo is a human at conception because everyone has DNA, which is unique, and this is formed at the moment of conception. The scientific view is that as soon as you can identify the embryo then its thought of as a human. According to the religious traditions, we are all unique because we are made by god and life is a special gift.
At the moment of conception the egg is fertilised, this is not always thought of as a human being, but as a couple of cells that have the potential to become a human. Many people rely on sacred text or religious leaders to decide whether the baby is human. For example Catholics, the Pope declared Catholics should not have abortions in any circumstances, even in circumstances as bad as rape. Most Catholics don’t have abortions because they devote themselves to their religion, therefore following their religious text.
DOES THE STATE BELIEVE THE UNBORN CHILD IS A HUMAN?
The state used to call abortion illegal. To destroy a child’s life inside the womb of the women was the same to do it outside the women. However, there were too many cases where the less wealthy women were still getting it done illegally in “back street clinics” in unhygienic and dirty conditions. This was where many abortions before 1967 took place. Thousands of women came to these clinics and a lot of them suffered permanent illness as a result of having an abortion and some women even died. So to stop these illegal abortions and people suffering, the Abortion Act was brought out in England, Wales and Scotland in 1967. This option was only meant to be used in some situations. Therefore, the state does not think of the unborn embryo as a human but as a collection of cells. Otherwise, the doctors would be charged with murder every time they performed an abortion. If this were the case, there would be many abortion doctors in jail for mass murders on babies. So obviously if they did consider an unborn embryo as human, it would give it rights as all humans have.
