(Reply to a cousin) Answering Pro-choice Arguments for Abortion (Infanticide) Part 1

When does the life of a human being begin? Scientists have recognized that human life begins at conception, the fertilization of a woman’s ovum by a sperm cell. (See https://www.princeton.edu/~prolife/articles/embryoquotes2.html.) That event means that a new human genome has naturally come into existence within, and for the life of, an independent being of the human kind. That being does not have a copy of its mother’s genome such as is found in any of the mother’s somatic cells. It follows that the fertilization of an ovum (for resultant presence of a zygote) is not, of course, like certain other developments in a woman’s body (e.g., that development that is the normative beginning of a programmatically timed appearance in adolescence for one of the functions in female bodies, namely, ovulation); fertilization of the egg involves two persons, but ovulation does not. The fertilized egg in a female’s body is not normatively present in her body like certain other things in her body that normatively and finally, by mitosis, became functioning existents (organs) in, and for the life of, her body as coded for in her genome alone. Nor is the zygote like the happenstance appearance of some unusual, unexpected, pathological tissue growth in her body. No, but from the beginning of its existence, the zygote is indeed a very specialized entity, a human being firstly resident—albeit for a very brief while—as that single (zygotic) cell in its mother’s body. That human being, however, after having come to term in its mother’s womb, will then be composed of about twenty-six billion diploid cells. So, from its first cell to its twenty-six billionth cell, that thing growing inside the woman has the sanctity of life belonging to a human being having both a father and a mother responsible for what unsurprisingly and recognizably is shown to be the parents’ child that had begun its growth in the child’s mother’s womb. Yes, it is, from its beginning of life, a human being, and thus not an appendage or organ naturally occurring as an integral constituent of the mother’s body. Therefore, the child in the womb is not like a kidney inside the woman’s body, a fact that supports this valid argument: although a woman may choose to have one of her two healthy kidneys removed for the sake of donating it in order to help a recipient of it to have better health, yet she will not remain free of bloodguilt in God’s eyes if she elects to remove (kill) the child growing in her womb, this also (ostensibly) for the sake of improving (her) health.  The kidney was part of her, as shown by the fact that its cells have the same genomic content as any other of her body parts’ cells. But the conceptus in her womb has its own genomic content different from either one of that child’s parents genomes, as appropriate to the fact that she has resident in her womb a human being.