Along with a solid proof, Trent shares new research that shows how thousands of biologists, most of whom are pro-choice, agree life begins at conception.
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. A production of Catholic Answers.
So, the issue of abortion has been in the news recently. And you’re going to hear about it a lot more as States like Texas and other States pass laws to defend the unborn and those laws make their way to the Supreme Court. What prompted me to make this video actually was that high school student’s graduation speech here in Texas. I’m sure you heard about it. She submitted a speech and then she completely went off script to go after Texas’ new law that would protect unborn children who are at least six weeks old. And now, I gave a speech at my high school graduation, and I remember having to submit it, get everything approved. One of the students on the advisory board for the speeches knew that I was a new Catholic, that I had converted just a year earlier. And he said, “Trent, have you tried to get any religious stuff in your speech, I’ll make sure that it’s thrown out.”
So, I included a bunch of allusions and references to scripture without citing them. But there’s certain rules about what you can and can’t say in these high school graduation speeches, and it’s such a double standard. It’s such a double standard that the media fawns over this girl for breaking the rules to talk about how pro-choice she is. But if a student were to break the rules and talk about how pro-life they were, the media would either ignore them or would vilify them as using the school as a platform to push her beliefs onto other people. So, it’s a double standard. Those who defend legal abortion … I’m not talking about just regular people who were muddled about the issue. I’m talking about the advocates, people who work for Planned Parenthood, people who are out there defending legal abortion, they will do anything.
They will lie through … My old pro-life mentor once told me, “Trent, they’ll lie through their teeth if they have to.” Think about it, if somebody believes it’s okay to kill a baby, to get what they want or let other people get what they want, what won’t they do? What won’t they do? If they think it should be legal to end a baby’s life, to kill a baby, dismember that child in the womb, what won’t they think is okay? So, it’s definitely not a fair fight, but the great thing is we have the facts and the evidence on our side. So, in today’s episode, I want to focus on one specific issue. Maybe in future episodes, I’ll do other pro-life breakdowns, but this is just how to prove human life begins at conception.
Now, I think a lot of people listening may say, “Well, Trent, that’s easy. I tell people, look, science proves life begins at conception. Science proves that, that’s when life begins. And I just tell people that and people agree.” That might be okay in some circumstances, but I think that’s actually a weak argument and we can do a lot better than that. So, that’s what I wanted to share with you in today’s episode. But if you want to really support us before I get into the really strong argument, be sure to click, “Like” and, “Subscribe” for this video on the Council of Trent, on YouTube. Haven’t been to our YouTube channel yet? Be sure to go and check it out, and be sure to go to TrentHornPodcast.com to get to bonus content, like our 18-hour catechism study series and our 18-hour New Testament study series, all that, and also a mug if you go to gold level or higher. All that and more at TrentHornPodcast.com.
All right, so what’s wrong with just saying, “Well, science proves life begins at conception”? Well, there’s no such thing as science says. Scientists differ. Look what we have with COVID for example. There’s scientists who’ve disagreed about the infectious rate and the spread and the safeguards we should have for COVID-19. So, science isn’t a monolith. I think people recognize that. Though, there are certain truths that the vast majority of scientists accept, and this is one of them, but if you lead with, “Science says,” people are going to say, “Well, that’s your pro-life scientist. That’s your Christian scientists, not Christian science, but scientists happen to be Christians. I don’t accept that appeal to authority.” So, what should we do instead? Well, what I like to do is to point out to people that life begins and conception by just proving three points about every unborn child, whether they are a fetus, which is a human being from the eighth week of life until birth, or they’re an embryo, which is a human being from conception until the seventh week of life. I show that the unborn are alive, human, and whole organisms.
So, instead of just saying, life begins at conception, we can say, “Look, every human fetus and human embryo is a biological human being. It is alive. It is human, and it is a whole organism.” So, how do we prove that? How do we prove that a fetus or embryo is alive? Well, if it’s growing by cellular reproduction, then it has to be alive. If it takes in nutrients and converts that to energy, then it’s alive. People might dispute whether some things like viruses are alive, but nobody to disputes that human embryos and fetuses are alive. There’s another more morbid way to put this. If they weren’t alive, you wouldn’t need abortion. I was at a debate once, and a guy in the audience said, “Mr. Horn, you didn’t even prove a fetus is alive.” And so I said, “Well, what does abortion do to the fetus?” And he said, “Well, it makes it go away.”
And I said, “Where?” Because he didn’t want to say it kills it, because in order to kill something, it has to have been alive in the first place. All right, well what about, “Okay, it’s alive. So, what? Lots of things are alive. We step on spiders. They’re alive. It’s not murder.” It’s not just that the unborn are alive. We need to show they’re alive, human, whole organisms, all right? So, how do we prove the unborn are human in the biological sense? We can just say, “Look, they have human DNA and human parents.” Human DNA with approximately 46 chromosomes, approximately because some people with down syndrome have one less someone. Someone with Klinefelter Syndrome has one more. Approximately 46 chromosomes. And if they have human parents, then they’ve got to be human. Now, some people will say, “Well, so what? Look at the cells on your skin. What about sperm? What about egg? They are growing. They take in nutrients and metabolize energy. They have human DNA. Are they human beings? If I scrape off my skin cells, am I killing a bunch of human beings?”
No, because there’s the third thing we’re showing. The unborn are alive, human, and they’re whole organisms. How do we know that they’re not a body part, like a skin cell? Well, I give what I call the NET test. N-E-T, what does that mean? Something is an organism if you can give it Nutrients, the right Environment, the right Nutrients, the right Environment, and Time. If you can give it those three things, and it goes from being an immature member of a species, to a mature member of a species, then it’s an organism. So, let me give you some examples. If you give a puppy the right nutrient and environments and time, it will become a dog.
If you give a human baby nutrients, environment, and time, it becomes an adult. But if you give sperm and egg cells or skin cells or cancer cells, give them any nutrients, any environment, any time, they will always be skin cells, sperm, egg, cancer cells. Why? Because they’re body parts. They’re not a whole organism. They failed the NET test. Now, we need to be clear. Not all organisms will reach maturity. Some organisms will die in immaturity, either from a disease or an accident or in the case of abortion, an inflicted active violence. But having that capacity to develop into a mature member of a species is something you and I have. Human infants have. Every embryo and fetus has, even if they die later from some kind of congenital defect or from something like abortion or an act of violence. But that capacity to develop is something sperm, egg, cancer cells, skin cells, body parts don’t have, embryos and fetuses do have, all right?
So, they’re alive, they’re human, and the NET test shows that they are a whole organism. And this is true from conception onwards, because some people will say to you, “Well, so what? It’s not a human, it’s an embryo,” or it’s not human, it’s a fetus. How should we respond? Just ask the person, what is a fetus? What is an embryo? Give me a definition. And the definition is a stage of development in the life of a human being. Saying that a fetus isn’t human because it’s a fetus is like saying a 15 year old isn’t human because they’re a teenager. It’s just a stage of development. Other people will say, “It’s a clump of cells, not a human being.” You can ask them, “Well, aren’t you a clump of cells? Aren’t I a clump of cells? What makes us different?” “Well, we’re a clump of cells that can think and feel.” That’s where you need to be very clear what we’re proving here.
We are not proving that the unborn are persons or have souls. We’re not saying that they’re human in a philosophical sense. We’re just saying the unborn embryos and fetuses, they’re biological human beings. Individual members of the human species. That’s all that we’re showing here. So, you can ask the person, “Okay, you’re saying it’s just a clump of cells. Well, you and I are a clump of cells, but you’re saying true humanity are a clump of cells that can think or feel or survive on their own. That’s philosophy. We’re just talking biology. Is this collection of cells an organism capable of developing into a mature member of a species if you give it nutrients, environment, and time?” Okay, so that’s a good argument to show the unborn or biological human beings from conception onwards.
Now, you need to be careful with your wording. You don’t want to say, “Every human life begins at conception, because in the case of identical twins, the twins, their lives might have begun when the embryo split in the womb into two separate embryos.” Some people try to say that twinning shows life doesn’t begin at conception, and I’ll explore that more in a future episode, but for right now, I would say, “Look, if you take a flatworm, okay? Take a flatworm and you cut it in half, there will be two flatworms there. Does that mean there was not a single flatworm before you made the cut? No, of course not. That would be nonsense. So, the fact that we have a human organism that can become two organisms, it doesn’t mean it’s not a biological human being before that.” But for the vast majority of cases, I think this argument is solid.
Show the unborn are alive, human, and they’re whole organisms. Once you’ve made this argument, then you can bring out the big guns and cite your sources. So, citing experts is great, but I think it’s good to make an argument first, alive, human, full organism, embryo and fetus are stages of development in the life of an organism, and then you can start quoting the experts. Some experts you might quote will be embryologists. So, here’s one, a textbook called Human embryology & teratology by Müller and O’Rahilly. It says, “Although human life is a continuous process, fertilization is a critical landmark because under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is formed.” So, fertilization is another word for conception. In fact, in 2019, Steve Jacobs wrote an article on Quillette called, I Asked Thousands of Biologists When Life Begins. The Answer Wasn’t Popular. So, he sent out this survey to thousands of biologists, and he said, “As the usable responses began to come in, I found that 5,337 biologists, or 96% of the survey, affirmed that a human’s life begins at fertilization.”
Only four percent ended up rejecting the view. He said the majority of the sample of biologists identified as liberal, 89%. 85% of them were pro-choice. And 63% of them were non-religious. 92% of biologists identify as Democrats, but they said that life begins at conception. What’s funny is he got a lot of hate mail from these biologists, even though they agreed with him that life begins at conception. So, here’s a few of the responses. They said, “Sure hope you aren’t a blanking Christian,” expletive omitted. “This is some stupid right-to-life thing. Yuck. I believe in right-to-choice.” Another one is more educated response. “The actual purpose of this survey became very clear. I will do my best to disseminate this info to make sure that none of my naive colleagues fall into this trap.” But here’s the thing, Jacobs is kind of a moderate on the issue of abortion. He’s not some kind of pro-life activist.
So, he writes in his article, “Given those responses, one might suspect I had asked loaded questions such as, ‘Since the human life cycle begins at conception, isn’t abortion tantamount to murder?’ But I didn’t. I asked an open-ended question to ensure that respondents were able to fully express their views on when life begins. Moreover, I asked respondents to assess the following elements of the view that a human’s life begins at fertilization. These are things like the end-product of mammalian fertilization is a fertilized egg, Zygote, a new mammalian organism in the first stage of its species’ life cycle with its species’ genome.” Here’s another one, “From a biological perspective, a Zygote that has a human genome is a human because it is a human organism developing in the earliest stage of the human life cycle.”
So, fascinating article, be sure to read it. I’ll link to it in the description below. And finally, another great thing that you can cite are philosophers who defend abortion. My favorite example is David Boonin and the author of A defense of abortion. He’s probably one of the smartest pro-choice advocates out there. This is what he says in his book. “Perhaps the most straightforward relation between you and me on the one hand, and every human fetus on the other is this. All our living members of the same species, homo-sapiens. A human fetus after all is simply a human being at a very early stage in his or her development.”
So, that’s part of the pro-life case. It’s not the whole thing. You can say, “Look, the human embryo and human fetus is a biological human organism.” So, then we ask the question, “Should all members of the human species, should all human organisms, or just all members of the human species have the same basic rights?” And if you think that some human beings, biological human beings should have less basic rights or no basic rights, well then why should I believe?
Hey guys, thank you so much. I hope this is helpful for you. If you want to go more in depth, check out my book Persuasive Pro-Life, and hopefully in a few weeks, I’ll release another episode where I talk about objections to the case that we’ve made here today. So, thank you guys so much, and I hope you have a very blessed day.
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