This is a great resource, informative and crisp, illustrating the fetal development timeline.
There has long been a common misperception that most abortions occur before the embryo or fetus is recognizably human. Day after day, thousands of aborting women wrongly believe that they’re simply eliminating some undifferentiated human cell tissue. Because the general ignorance of prenatal development is so convenient to the abortion industry, it’s not hard to guess why Planned Parenthood does so little to accurately educate their clients. Of course, even if human embryos didn’t become so recognizably human in such a short amount of time, would that somehow change the ethics of abortion? Afterall, isn’t it the height of injustice to abuse another member of the human community simply because they don’t look the way we expect them to? Abortion is not the mere removal cell tissue; it is the death of living, growing human beings.
Those who know me know that I am quite firmly agnostic. I am not weak case agnostic, which states that I do not know, but strong case agnosticism, which states that humans cannot know. I feel that this is a more valid, scientific point of view than to state a definite opinion on the nature of something which is not properly the realm of science. To say that I do not believe X is most particularly a statement about me, not about X. So my objection to abortion is rooted not in religion, nor in a conceit of the relative importance of my own opinion compared to reality. What is simply is, and we must admit an imperfect knowledge in order to speak honestly.
Those who support abortion rely upon a balance of rights between a pregnant woman and a developing fetus. To speak reasonably on this topic, then, we must know something about fetal development. Yet the conversation is invariably couched in terms of a woman’s right “to choose” and so forth by those who support abortion. That is a valid concern, but like many questions of balance, if considered by itself it does not illuminate the debate.
