There’s this really dumb question going around about when human life begins.  At conception?  At “viability”?  At birth?  I am no biologist or medical doctor, and my last biology class was sometime before 9th grade, but this is really pretty basic stuff.

Let’s take a step back and consider the reproductive process:  We begin with an egg cell and a sperm cell which fertilizes the egg.  Once the fertilized egg begins to divide, we call it an embryo until it reaches a particular prenatal developmental stage, and we begin calling it a fetus.  That fetus, at full term, is brought into the world through childbirth.  With me so far?

Here’s a question for my erudite opponents:  When did life ever end?  When was that developing human not alive?  The sperm cell was alive.  The egg cell was alive.  The embryo was alive.  The fetus was alive.  That newborn baby is certainly alive.  The answer is that life never ended, and that’s really easy to prove.

Let’s try a simple thought experiment.  This is what physicists do when faced with a problem that they don’t necessarily want to conduct in real life, to the relief of a great many superimposed felines.  If you spontaneously stop the life of the sperm or egg or embryo or fetus at any point in the process, can it ever be born as a living human?  Of course not.  That’s the whole point of abortion.

From the beginning of the sperm and egg cells until the time a child is born, there has always been at minimum one living cell with distinctly human DNA.  The natural progression is for that fertilized egg to develop into a grown human unless the mother miscarries—a tragedy—or has an abortion—a horror.

From the time of the first two human beings until each of us today, there has been continuous uninterrupted life:  An unbroken chain of human cellular life from me through the entirety of my ancestry back to the beginning of the human race.  If that life had ever ceased at any point, you wouldn’t be reading this.

Life is a precious gift, and in its weakest and most vulnerable times it needs love and protection.  To ask when it begins is misinformed or disingenuous or in some cases downright evil.