Abortion views reflect religion and should not be a matter of law, says Modesto writer

You’ve got to hand it to anti-abortion activists in the Republican party and the Supreme Court justices now doing their bidding. At least they’re being consistent.

If we grant that a newly-fertilized human ovum is a “person,” killing or otherwise terminating that life is indeed murder. And the fact that this potential human being was conceived through rape or incest does not mitigate the crime. It’s not the fault of the fertilized ovum that a drunken uncle brought it into existence. Even a 10-year-old rape victim must not be allowed to abort the person criminally implanted within her, right?

Wrong. Because a newly-fertilized human ovum is distinctly not, and is in absolutely no stretch of the imagination, a person.

Let’s avoid scientific arguments for the moment and use our common sense. To those who hold the belief that the ovum in question is a person, I would simply ask them to describe him or her. For example, is he or she kindhearted or cruel? Is the ovum witty and outgoing or humdrum and withdrawn? Does the fertilized egg honor his or her mother and father or is he or she obstreperous and disobedient?

These are not silly questions. They are perfectly valid attempts to elicit what it is that defines a “person.” They get to the core of one’s personality, without which all we have is an amorphous entity that may be genetically human, but is no more so than a strand of your daughter’s hair or a cell scraped from the inside of your son’s cheek.

I’m not trying to be flippant. There will come a time when cells taken from human tissue can be nurtured into an embryo and eventually into a fully functioning human indistinguishable from a person naturally conceived and carried in its mother’s womb.

Where did this notion come from, that a freshly-fertilized human egg must be treated as a person worthy of the right to life?

Certainly not philosophy or science, whose consensus is that human personhood begins no sooner than the stage at which a fetus becomes viable outside the womb.

Let me ask: What are your earliest memories, dear reader? At what point in your life did you realize you existed? When did you not only become aware of external stimuli, but begin to apprehend your own past, your relationships to other beings both similar and dissimilar to yourself? At what stage did your rudimentary reactions to pain and pleasure develop into conscious perceptions of what you liked and didn’t like, in a way that allowed you to predict whether or not you would enjoy some future activity?

Had you been aborted before that psychological baseline, had you died in childbirth or expired weeks later from a congenital heart defect, you would simply not have existed.

So let’s return to the question of where the notion of a human egg’s right to life comes from.

Faith affects abortion stance

The answer: religion.

And not every religion. Far from it.

Judaism generally pegs the recognition of human life at the moment a baby takes its first breath after childbirth, and its membership in the community celebrated — for males, at least — following the eighth-day rite of circumcision.

Buddhists and Hindus, who embrace the crucial difference between a physical body and one’s eternal soul, acknowledge that a developing fetus has no capacity whatsoever for hosting a personal or spiritual entity; therefore its destruction through miscarriage or abortion can’t be labeled as murder, even if the taking of life should always be considered with great care.

Islam, walking a kind of spiritual middle-ground, holds that a fetus becomes “ensouled” around the fourth month of pregnancy, which means that an abortion up to that point would not constitute the taking of a person’s life. Even then, Prophet Muhammad was quoted in the Hadith saying that no soul destined to be born won’t actually be born. In other words, every person this side of childbirth who is alive was meant for mortal life. An aborted fetus was never intended by an all-knowing god to be a person from the start.

Those who believe otherwise, by and large, are evangelical protestants and Roman Catholics. Or politicians who cynically dance to their hymnal because they covet votes.

And the fact is, the Constitution of the United States does not allow religious beliefs, however strongly held, to act as the sole basis for its secular laws.

If a certain religion or sect maintains that abortion is murder because its sacred scripture or tenets tell them so, that mere belief simply cannot be enshrined into our nation’s legal system. The right-to-life position must be established through appeal to rational or moral arguments independent of what someone accepts on faith. Otherwise, enacting laws prohibiting abortion are impositions of a religious minority on the majority.

America is not only better than such an authoritarian, theocratic approach, we are constitutionally bound to reject it.