On August 14, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that an informational pamphlet distributed to Arizona voters in the fall prior to a referendum on whether the state will guarantee a constitutional right to abortion may refer to “unborn human beings.” Abortion activists had been fighting to block such language from being used because dehumanizing the unborn is key to persuading voters to support feticide.
Arizona for Abortion Access had sued the majority-Republican legislative council over the use of the phrase “unborn human being,” insisting that this description was “politicized language”; the Arizona Superior Court had concurred, stating that the phrase was “packed with emotion and partisan meaning.” The Arizona Supreme Court overturned the ruling of the Superior Court, meaning that “unborn human being” will appear in the voter information pamphlet. Unfortunately, the secretary of state’s office has stated that the phrase will not appear on the ballot itself.
“We are deeply disappointed in this ruling but will not be deterred from doing everything in our power to communicate to voters the truth of the Arizona Abortion Access Act and why it’s critical to vote YES to restore and protect access to abortion care this fall,” stated Arizona for Abortion Access. Arizona House Speaker Ben Toma, who co-chairs the legislative council which drafted the language and included “unborn human being,” disagreed. “The Arizona Supreme Court’s ruling is correct,” he said.
It is clear that abortion activists see recognition of the unborn as human beings as a threat to their agenda, which is unsurprising. Arizona for Abortion Access insisted that voters, who will decide the fate of thousands of unborn human beings on November 5 (as will voters in many other states holding abortion referendums), will now be “subjected to biased, politically-charged words developed not by experts but by anti-abortion special interests.”
This brazen lie is worth responding to. An honest media would report the scientific facts relevant to this case – but they won’t, because the facts undermine the abortion agenda by revealing the fact that abortion is an act of violence that brutally ends the life of a human being in the womb. Let me quote from Moore & Persaud’s definitive textbook, The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, the 10th edition published in 2016: “Human development begins at fertilization when a sperm fuses with an oocyte to form a single cell, the zygote. [This] marks the beginning of each of us as a unique individual.”
That textbook is used in medical schools across North America. Would Arizona for Abortion Access consider that to be full of “biased, politically-charged words developed not by experts but by anti-abortion special interests”? Or how about the words of Dr. Maureen Condic, Associate Professor of Neurobiology and Anatomy at the University of Utah School of Medicine:
From the moment of sperm-egg fusion [the beginning of fertilization], a human zygote acts as a complete whole with all the parts of the zygote interacting in an orchestrated fashion to generate the structures and relationships required for the zygote to continue developing towards its mature state… The zygote acts immediately and decisively to initiate a program of development that will, if uninterrupted by accident, disease, or external intervention, proceed seamlessly through formation of the definitive body, birth, childhood adolescence, maturity, and aging, ending with death. This coordinated behavior is the very hallmark of an organism.
From fertilization, we do not have a human part – we have, as Condic affirms, a complete human whole. But if even these experts are not enough for Arizona for Abortion Access, I would invite them to consider a 2019 study by Steve Jacobs, which he summarized in an article for Quillette titled “I Asked Thousands of Biologists When Life Begins. The Answer Wasn’t Popular.” Why wasn’t it popular? Well, because, as it turns out, the scientific consensus that life begins at fertilization is iron-clad and overwhelming, a discovery that disturbed many members of the press:
[M]embers of the media were mostly interested in my finding that 96% of the 5,577 biologists who responded to me affirmed the view that a human life begins at fertilization. It was the reporting of this view – that human zygotes, embryos, and fetuses are biological humans – that created such a strong backlash. It was not unexpected, as the finding provides fodder for conservative opponents of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court had suggested there was no consensus on ‘the difficult question of when life begins’ and that ‘the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, [was] not in a position to speculate as to the answer.’
The truth about when life begins is not popular because abortion activists wish to deceive the public into thinking that abortion does not kill human beings. The entire controversy would be humorous if it weren’t so depressing. If you go to medical school anywhere in North America, your embryology textbook will inform you that a new, unique, living, and whole human being begins at the moment of fertilization. We know when life begins, and we have known for a very long time.
Even the language we use indicates that we do, in fact, know when life begins. When we say that a child in the womb is “twelve weeks” or “twenty-two weeks,” what are we saying? Twelve weeks from what, exactly? The answer, of course, is obvious – twelve weeks from the beginning of that new human being’s life.
Progressives claim that science is the ultimate standard, and eagerly brandish any new study that confirms a point of view that is currently in vogue with their set. But when science proves that their abortion advocacy is a grotesque push for the violent ending of a human life that has already begun, they angrily demand that the evidence be tossed out so that they can continue to live – and kill – as they wish.
