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The theme of Friday's March for Life is "Equality Begins in the Womb." It emphasizes the horrific discrimination of mass abortion, which targets non-white babies, biological females, and those with Down syndrome.
Since most people aren't aware of this imbalance and "equality" dominates the headlines today, one can see why the March for Life chose it as a priority for 2022.
MARCH FOR LIFE ADVOCATES ‘EQUALITY’ AS ABORTION DISPROPORTIONATELY IMPACTS MINORITIES
Pro-life demonstrators hold signs during the March for Life 2020 rally in Washington D.C., U.S. on Jan 24, 2020. President Donald Trump became the first sitting president to address the anti-abortion rally on the National Mall on Friday as he courts conservative voters before the November elections. Photographer: Yuki Iwamura/Bloomberg via Getty Images (Getty Images)
However, March for Life's "equality" theme takes for granted that Americans have a basic understanding of early human development. But most don't, and acknowledging the humanity of the unborn is a prerequisite to perceiving the inequities and injustices against them, as well as how these disparities directly set the stage for and advance discrimination during subsequent stages of human development.
In other words, most people are scientifically illiterate about the human nature of the embryo and fetus, so the theme does not yet resonate. Sadly, many Americans still don’t necessarily recognize that abortion is legalized killing, never mind gross, blatant discrimination in the womb rooted in historic racism, sexism, etcetera.
The foundation of this scientific illiteracy is a monstrous fallacy concocted by Roe v. Wade – the notion that science does not know when a human life starts, and that therefore a human embryo or a human fetus (of any race, sex, ability, etc.) is not an "individual" human being.
That idea was an absurd position for the Supreme Court to take in 1973. Considering the past half-century of awesome scientific, technological, and medical advancements in our understanding of early human development, it’s an even more preposterous notion today.
Yet in Roe v. Wade, Justice Blackmun declared: "We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins." That was disingenuous at best, because even at the time there was no confusion about when a human life began.
And nearly 50 years later, during oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Sonia Sotomayor blatantly denied the scientific facts of the biological science of human embryology when she claimed that the beginning of a human life was "a religious issue." Not to mention that Justice Sotomayor compared a human fetus to a brain-dead person, dismissed the fact that a human fetus has the capacity to feel pain, and linked a human being’s consciousness to human rights, i.e., personhood.
When a human life begins is not a subjective political, religious, or personal matter. It was set out in cold empirical detail as long ago as 1942, in the Carnegie Stages of Human Embryonic Development. The Carnegie Stages were instituted by the National Museum of Health and Medicine’s Human Developmental Anatomy Center (a sister agency to the National Library of Medicine) and continue to be documented, refined, and advanced as the global standard of human embryological research. Stage 1 is still the gold standard for understanding human sexual reproduction.
Here's what it says. All sexually reproduced human beings start to exist at fertilization, which initiates the continuum of human life. Thus, after fertilization, the new human being does not become a different kind of thing. He or she continues to grow and develop as the same human organism throughout the rest of the embryonic period, the fetal period, and then after birth, during the subsequent stages of life.
That is, fertilization is when a human life starts and "personhood" begins – not at "viability," "consciousness," or some later point that conveniently fits a particular narrative. Does Justice Sotomayor truly believe there are human non-persons? And does she understand that the definition of "personhood" she suggested would render her a "non-person" while she is sleeping?
These are not difficult facts to comprehend. Even elementary school children can grasp that the term "human embryo" or "human fetus" is simply the scientific name for an already-existing human being during the embryonic or fetal period of human development.
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Roe anchors and energizes the lie that human development is arbitrary and subjective, that a human embryo or a human fetus is not an "individual" human being. As long as Roe holds and obstructs the scientifically accurate information about when a human being begins to exist, "Equality Begins in the Womb" will unfortunately produce apathy, not action among the general public.
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March for Life is, of course, absolutely right to point out that abortion is influenced by eugenics, but until Roe is overturned and states are free to recognize and protect all of the unborn members of our species too, abortion will continue to brutally eliminate millions of people without due process, including, as late Ruth Bader Ginsburg paradoxically explained in an interview with the New York Times, "populations that we don’t want to have too many of."
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