Science on abortion
Science is moving forward!
Dr Nathanson's conclusions are already out of date today. Modern nuclear medicine has made a leap in its development.
1) Here is what scientific observations carried out with the help of modern technology tell us:
a) From the 18th day the heartbeat of the embryo can be detected, and an entirely distinct circulatory system of its own begins to work!
b) In the 7th week (50 days), brain impulses are recorded in the not-yet-born child, and for science this is the main criterion for establishing whether a person is alive or dead. The little person has fully formed internal and external organs. He has eyes, a nose, lips, a tongue.
c) In the 10th week (70 days), the not-yet-born child has all the features that children have after birth (9 months).
d) In the 12th week (92 days, 3 months), all the child's organs are completely formed; he even has fingerprints! All that remains is growth! A three-month-old embryo is already at such a stage of development that it turns its head, moves, grimaces, clenches its fingers into a fist, finds its mouth and sucks its thumb!
2) These observations are confirmed by the work of the obstetricians Dr and Mrs Willke. In their studies, illustrated with 30 colour slides, they prove with purely medical arguments that abortion is premeditated murder, and that from the scientific point of view it is impossible seriously to justify some “magic moment” before which the embryo is a piece of flesh and after which it turns into a child, a human being.
3) Of particular interest is the abortion of an eight-week (2-month) embryo performed by Dr Paul Rockwell (New York, USA):
“Fourteen years ago I was giving an anaesthetic to a patient for an ectopic pregnancy. The embryo was over 2 months old. I took the amniotic sac in my hand and saw the smallest human body anyone has ever touched. In the amniotic fluid a tiny human being was swimming quite fast — a male, 5 inches long. This tiny person was fully formed, with long, tapering fingers. His skin was almost transparent, and on his fingertips the arteries and veins could be clearly seen. The baby was active, swimming at the rate of one lap per second, like a real swimmer. When the sac burst, the tiny person lost his life and took on the familiar look of an embryo of that age, with stiffened limbs… I had the feeling that I was looking at a dead adult…”
4) The well-known French professor of the University of Paris, the specialist in cell genetics Jérôme Lejeune, writes:
“Like every scientist who observes biological phenomena impartially, I hold that a human being begins his life at the moment of fertilisation. And this means that destroying an embryo of any age is equivalent to killing a human being.”
Speaking at the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences on 1 October 1973, the professor declared: “The life of a human being begins at the moment of conception. From that moment it is complete and unique. It is always absolutely the same in its structure, and nothing in it can be changed.
This tiny embryo, on the 6th or 7th day of its life, when it is only 1.5 mm long, is already able to take care of itself and its future fate. It, precisely it, brings about the interruption of the mother's cycle, thereby obliging the mother to protect it.”
5) In 1981 the US Senate, which was discussing the abolition of penalties connected with abortion, asked 8 leading specialists for their opinion on one question: “When does the life of the embryo begin?” Seven of the 8 authorities consulted declared that, according to scientific data (medicine, biology and so on), life begins at the moment of conception.
Since then the justice of the law adopted in the USA has been called into question more and more.
6) And finally, we would like to give you the conclusion of Dr Ernest Hunt, which he reached in one of his socio-biological and philosophical studies. Dr Hunt writes:
“The fertilised egg is not a mere cellular mass without special characteristics of its own. At this stage it resembles neither a flower bud nor, still less, an animal embryo. It is wholly and absolutely the life of a human being, the same life that a newborn baby, a child, an adolescent and an adult have. Thus in abortion a human life, a human existence, perishes, even though that life is at the very earliest stage of its development.”
7) After all this we have the right to ask: can anyone still doubt that the embryo has its own autonomous life and is an independent, formed human being?
And again the question arises in us: “Where is progress? Where and who is in the vanguard? Do words have any worth when deeds cry out? Where is the apostolate of darkness? Who represents it?” Not the Church, at any rate.
