Is Conception Irrelevant Now?
This word, “conception,” is an interesting word. If you look it up in a dictionary, it has two meanings. The first meaning is “the action of conceiving a child or of a child being conceived.” This is the most common understanding of the word. Conception is when a sperm fertilizes an egg. Conception is when human DNA is created. Conception is when pregnancy has started and a baby is on the way.
Of course, there’s a second definition of the word. The second meaning of the word is “the forming or devising of a plan or idea.”
This second definition is interesting, is it not? It might sum up much of our conflict over abortion. Pro-lifers usually put themselves in the first group. Conception is when a baby has been created. And pro-choice people put themselves in the second group. Conception is a plan or idea.
Maybe both sides are right.
Think about human DNA for a second. What is human DNA, if not a blueprint for a human being? When God creates a human being, he first draws up an amazing blueprint. If we wanted to build a human being in a science lab -- and skip all the fun of human sexuality -- we would first have to figure out the blueprints. We’d have to write out human DNA from scratch.
We might think about conception as God’s plan for a human being. DNA has been created. The blueprints have been drawn up. Creation has begun. A baby is on the way.
The abortion clinic chain, Planned Parenthood, talks about an unplanned pregnancy. “This pregnancy was not planned.” What they mean, of course, is that the two adults involved--the mother and the father--did not plan on a pregnancy.
That language is a little misleading, since every pregnancy has a blueprint. Every unborn child has original human DNA, created by God. Every pregnancy is planned. Maybe it’s not our plan. But we know, from that DNA blueprint, that there is a plan for a human being. And that plan was drawn up by the Creator, the Lord, the giver of life.
Conception is unenforceable by human beings
So I was trained to be a lawyer, and I often still think like a lawyer. When I was an attorney, many years ago, I might have said that “conception is irrelevant.” At the time, I was a bit dismissive of that biological point.
Conception involves a microscopic organism. It involves a human microscopic organism. But it’s still a microscopic organism.
I resisted the idea of calling a single-celled zygote a “baby.” That seemed ridiculous to me, for many reasons. A baby has a head. A microscopic organism does not have a head. A baby has a brain. A microscopic organism does not have a brain. A baby has a heartbeat. A microscopic organism does not have a heartbeat.
I focused on babies, and the issue of infanticide, because that seemed to me the crux of the fight. People are afraid that abortion doctors are killing babies. Our media ruthlessly censors abortion photographs, because people are afraid that abortion doctors are killing babies.
(Kudos to Professor Monica Migliorino Miller for documenting these atrocities).
There seems to me a huge moral difference between aborting a zygote (the single-celled organism in the first image) and aborting a baby. My concern at the time was that the debate over conception was distracting people from the issue of infanticide. I wanted our legal authorities to remove infanticide from the fight. Not by hiding the bodies, which our media has been doing. I wanted our legal authorities to remove infanticide from the fight by paying attention to our rules in regard to when people die.
We have universal agreement in our society in regard to when human beings die. Not just in the USA, but around the world. The standard for human death is “total brain death.” If a baby has any activity in her brain at all, she is alive, and the doctors who have stabbed her or poisoned her have killed her.
Electrical activity in a baby’s brain starts six weeks after conception. At this point in her development, the baby is roughly an inch in diameter. That’s far, far bigger than a microscopic organism. The rate of growth is fantastic, obviously. In a little over a month, the unborn has grown from a single-celled organism into a tiny human child.
It is entirely fair for people to refer to these children as “babies.” In fact, we routinely refer to children in the womb as babies, when we’re happy about a pregnancy. When we’re afraid or mad or hateful about a pregnancy, we dismiss the idea that this is a child. We don’t want to see photographs and we don’t want to talk about it. This repression is awful, in my opinion, but it’s also completely understandable.
After 49 years, Roe v. Wade is Overruled
Roe v. Wade, the judicial opinion that legalized infanticide, was overruled last year. I say that Roe legalized infanticide, because the opinion classified all unborn children, from conception (when it’s not a baby) until birth (when she is a baby), as legal “non-persons.” In other words, the United States Supreme Court kicked unborn children out of humanity.
The opinion that finally overruled Roe last year, Dobbs v. Jackson, was a brilliant (and very brave) opinion. The author, Justice Alito, destroyed Roe so thoroughly, there is no chance of it ever being resurrected at the Supreme Court. So the abortion fight is now in the political realm.
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court continues to dehumanize unborn children, and the Court has never applied the equal protection clause (or our death statutes) to protect these vulnerable babies. So we have many “blue” states where abortion is legal up until birth. And the homicides continue.
We also have “red” states where abortion is outlawed once the baby’s heart starts beating (that happens a couple of weeks before brain activity). And we have “purple” states, like my state, North Carolina, where we have arbitrary rules that have nothing to do with the baby’s development whatsoever.
North Carolina’s rule is 12 weeks, which is just as arbitrary as the rules laid out in Roe v. Wade. When people make calendar rules about abortion, it’s like saying you can abort on Tuesdays but not on Fridays. You can abort in June but not July. To ignore the baby’s development and just throw some regulatory shit out there is a joke.
Interestingly, zero states have outlawed abortion at conception. What we’re seeing, over and over, are red states outlawing abortion at heartbeat. So it’s a lie to say that Mississippi or Texas or any other “red” state is outlawing abortion completely. The baby’s heartbeat happens roughly four weeks after conception. Your brain doesn’t control your heart -- the human heart has its own little motor that operates independently of activity in the human brain. The heart is a vital organ. In a baby’s development, the heart starts up first, circulating blood around the baby’s body. Two weeks after that (roughly six weeks after conception), brain activity starts.
What about conception?
Conception is irrelevant to our criminal laws because no human being knows when conception happens. We have a scientific theory -- maybe it’s a fact, I’m not a scientist -- that a sperm and an egg unite at the microscopic level, forming human DNA and an individual human being.
But I don’t think we can prove it! And, more importantly, no human being knows the exact moment that conception happens. Only God knows. The earliest that we can detect that a woman is pregnant is implantation, which happens a week to 10 days after conception. Conception is all guesswork for doctors. Indeed, doctors can never tell women exactly where they are in a pregnancy. They’ve guessing what week she is in. (That’s one reason the “12 week” law in North Carolina is so stupid, nobody can reliably answer that question).
49 years ago, when Texas argued in support of its criminal abortion statute, the attorneys for Texas did not bother with conception. Again, nobody knows when it happens, so conception remains a mystery. And there are theoretical problems with the point, too. Human twins, for instance, do not come into being at conception. Human twins come into being after conception, when the zygote splits into two zygotes. So conception has always been problematic as a legally enforceable point.
To enforce conception in criminal laws, states would have to be over-protective, and outlaw some forms of contraception, like an IUD or some birth control pills. Those laws would offend Griswold v. Connecticut, the opinion that found a constitutional right to use birth control. And, more importantly, prosecuting attorneys couldn’t prove that an abortion even happened at those very early stages.
What’s nice about all these heartbeat states is that they have effectively stopped the abortion industry in those states, and a lot of abortion clinics are closing down. But the states are allowing very early abortions, which is super helpful to rape victims or people who had sex they regret.
Suppose you have drunk sex, and you’re really worried about a pregnancy. You could take a simple home pregnancy test, which reliably tells you if you are pregnant 7 to 10 days after conception. (So you might have to take multiple tests to be on the safe side). If the test is positive, you could swallow an abortion pill in all 50 states in the union. So, even in Texas or Mississippi, rape victims and people who had drunk one night stands can still choose to abort their pregnancy. They just have to do it super-early in the process (and not wait for missing a period, the symptom that traditionally notifies women they are pregnant).
My conclusion, then, is that conception is an incredibly important point for spiritual reasons, scientific reasons, and human reasons. Conception is when the miracle of creation happens, and a human being is introduced in a mother’s womb! But it’s not an important point in criminal court. And it won’t be. Because we don’t know when it happens.