Research Paper: Pro-Life

\"The National Council of Catholic Bishops then turned the National Right to Life Committee into a membership organization which became the largest and most visible of the antiabortion groups, with over eighteen hundred affiliates and an estimated eleven million members by the end of the decade.\"

\"Social conservatives saw abortion as more evidence of the collapse of the nation's moral values in that it offered women an additional way to ignore their sexual responsibility. This seemed another manifestation of the feminist movement. These conservatives linked abortion, gay rights, and feminism as part of a general effort to overturn the natural, God-given order of sexual relations.\"

\"The Pope contends that a human being is ensouled at the moment that the ovum is fertilized. Even if science cannot confirm the presence of a spiritual soul at the moment of conception, the Pope argues, research clearly shows that the fertilized egg is endowed with a \"personal presence\" that is distinct from both mother and father. That distinct new life, he explains, would not be able to become human if it were not intrinsically human already, and so it must be protected throughout its development.\"

\"Although a fertilized ovum, or \"zygote,\" may not look like a human being, it is nevertheless a distinct person, according to pro-life advocates. They point out that a newborn child does not look like an adult person, but that does not make the child any less human. Just as children need time to develop before they look like adults, a fetus needs time to develop before it looks like a newborn baby, they say.\"

\"It is reprehensible, pro-life advocates argue, to sanction the killing of a human being simply because it is developing inside the womb rather than outside the mother. 'Is there any fundamental difference between a baby who resides in his mother's uterus and one who has made an eight-inch journey down the birth canal?' asks James Dobson, founder and president of Focus on the Family, a Christian organization that opposes abortion.\"

\"Indeed, a number of medical authorities agree that there is ample evidence that the fetus, even as a single cell in the womb, is a human being. Their medical argument often hinges on the fact that from the moment of conception, the fetus has 46 distinct human chromosomes. Chromosomes are the protein structures in every cell that carry a person's genetic information.\"

\"Early in the pregnancy, they point out, the fetus begins to develop a distinct human appearance, with hands, toes, feet and a beating heart. The fetus reacts to stimuli and moves around in the womb long before the mother can feel it. The pictures, they say, are ample evidence that the fetus is a human being in his or her early stages of development. A developing human being, they stress, is still a human being and not something that is somehow \"pre-human\" or inhuman.\"

\"An unborn child, regardless of which stage of fetal development it is in, has a fundamental right to life. Since life begins at conception, abortion is tantamount to murder.\"

\"The life of an unborn child certainly outweighs any possible infringement of personal liberty experienced by a pregnant woman, who had the responsibility for getting pregnant in the first place. In fact, the Constitution says nothing about a fundamental right to privacy, and certainly does not say anything about the right of a woman to kill her fetus. Thus the states, not the federal government, possess the power to restrict abortion as much as they want to; any attempt to regulate abortion through the federal court system subverts the sovereignty of the states and the democratic process.\"

\"Finally, the fact that the overwhelming majority of states have passed laws over the past century prohibiting abortion is a telling indication that the practice has a persistent, universal opposition among Americans.\"

\"A woman's privacy and the various difficulties of an unwanted pregnancy certainly mattered, they said, but not nearly as much as the killing of an innocent, unborn child. Furthermore, they argued, those issues were not even the purview of the federal government; since the Constitution said nothing about a 'right to privacy' or abortion, only the state legislatures should determine under what circumstances a woman could have an abortion, if at all.\"

\"They say that requiring a woman to finish her pregnancy deprives her of her liberty for only nine months. In the case of an abortion, however, the fetus loses its life. If both the mother and fetus are equally human, requiring the woman to finish her pregnancy would therefore result in the least overall harm, they say.\"