Who says?

The debate rages on. Loud voices demand that women be able to do with their bodies whatever they want. "Bodily autonomy." Others say, "Hang on, a minute. We don't want to prevent you from making choices about your body; we're just concerned about you terminating someone else's." "That's not a person!" is generally the reply. Personhood is an odd beast; it is undefined. So in today's world in order to maintain the "logic" of killing the unborn children, they've manufactured the "non-person human being." It is, by any standard, arbitrary. Ask any scientist, any biologist, and the answer you get will vary if you get one at all. Some argue that personhood begins at conception. Some argue that it begins at the exit from the birth canal. There are other voices that argue all the way out to 3 years old or so, depending on when they become "self-aware" (which, as you can imagine, has no real test). Fine. I'm not here to solve that question. But the complaint continues, "You're just trying to impose your religious beliefs on us!!" And this just isn't true.

Here's what is true. The individual life of the species we will call "human being" begins at fertilization and ends at death. That's science. That's not religion. Who says? Well, this textbook, for one:

Human development begins at fertilization, the process during which a male gamete or sperm (spermatozoon development) unites with a female gamete or oocyte (ovum) to form a single cell called a zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marked the beginning of each of us as a unique individual.

It was soon realized that the zygote contains all the genetic information necessary for directing the development of a new human being.

(Keith Moore, T. V. N. Persaud, and Mark Torchia, The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, 10th Edition, (Philadelphia: Saunders, 2015), pgs 7, 11.)

How about the medical embryology manual?

Development begins with fertilization, the process by which the male gamete, the sperm, and the female gamete, the oocyte, unite to give rise to a zygote.

(T.W. Sadler, Langman’s Medical Embryology, 14th Edition, (Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2018), pg 14.)

This textbook specifies that religious and personal views are out there, but science is not ambiguous:

Embryology is concerned with the origin and development of a human being from zygote to birth.

There are different opinions of when an embryo becomes a human being because opinions are often affected by religious and personal views. The scientific answer is that the embryo is a human being from the time of fertilization because of its human chromosomal constitution. The zygote is the beginning of a developing human.

(Keith L. Moore, T. V. N. Persaud, and Mark Torchia, Before We Are Born: Essentials of Embryology, 9th Edition, (Philadelphia: Saunders, 2015), pgs 1, 339.)

How about one from Peter Singer? You know, Peter Singer who believes that personhood doesn't occur until self-awareness occurs and children up to the age of 3 should be allowed to be killed. This might be what is termed "evidence from a hostile witness."

It is possible to give "human being" a precise meaning. We can use it as equivalent to "member of the species Homo sapiens". Whether a being is a member of a given species is something that can be determined scientifically, by an examination of the nature of the chromosomes in the cells of living organisms. In this sense there is no doubt that from the first moments of its existence, an embryo conceived from human sperm and eggs is a human being.

(Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 2nd Edition, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pgs 85-86.)

Who says that what's in the womb is a human being? Science does. We can debate until we're blue in the face when personhood occurs. There is no test for that. Science, however, is quite clear. Human life begins at fertilization and ends at death. Science, not religion. And do we need my religion to tell you that it's morally wrong to murder a 4-year-old? I don't think so. In the end, then, this question has nothing at all to do with either personhood or religion. My religion most assuredly causes me to place a higher value on human life than others might, but I don't need you to share that value. This is about science and the shared value that human beings deserve protection from murder. Anything else is a dodge. And if the argument can be maintained that some human beings don't have the right to life, then it cannot be maintained with anything other than arbitrary opinion that anyone has that right. You don't want to go there.