Seth Dorman

For The Maine Campus

Wednesday is the 41st anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case that legalized abortion in the United States. About 57 million fetuses have been aborted in the U.S. since then.

Looking back at history, we often struggle to understand how people can be blind — or just silent — to the evils around them. We don’t understand how the idea that racism and slavery are normal and unproblematic could be popularly held, or how Germans under Hitler could fail to notice the persecution of millions of Jews. But we are so much a product of our own time that it is nearly impossible to step back from ourselves and identify what we are doing wrong, and even if we do, we are usually too scared to say or do anything. This is not merely a passive mistake. In the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor during World War II who was executed for his participation in a plot to assassinate Hitler: “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

This is not a sideline issue: If these are human beings being aborted, then since 1973, as a nation, we are guilty of 57 million murders. That is what is at stake if you think abortion is right and you are actually wrong. To apathetically write this off is to choose to ignore a practice with more than nine times the death toll of the Holocaust.

In light of this, is abortion actually murder? If life begins at conception, the unavoidable answer is yes. The National Association for the Advancement of Preborn Children (NAAPC) cites a number of professors and scientists on this issue:

Professor Hymie Gordon, Mayo Clinic: “By all the criteria of modern molecular biology, life is present from the moment of conception.”

Professor Micheline Mathews-Roth, Harvard University Medical School: “It is incorrect to say that biological data cannot be decisive. […] It is scientifically correct to say that an individual human life begins at conception. […] Our laws, one function of which is to help preserve the lives of our people, should be based on accurate scientific data.”

Dr. Watson A. Bowes, University of Colorado Medical School said: “The beginning of a single human life is from a biological point of view a simple and straightforward matter — the beginning is conception. This straightforward biological fact should not be distorted to serve sociological, political or economic goals.”

On their website, NAAPC details the accounts of other doctors who have come to the conclusion that, biologically speaking, life begins at conception: “Dr. Bernard Nathanson, internationally known obstetrician and gynecologist, was a cofounder of what is now the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). He owned and operated what was at the time the largest abortion clinic in the Western Hemisphere. He was directly involved in over 60,000 abortions. Dr. Nathanson’s study of developments in the science of fetology and his use of ultrasound to observe the unborn child in the womb led him to the conclusion that he had made a horrible mistake. Resigning from his lucrative position, Nathanson wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine that he was deeply troubled by his ‘increasing certainty that I had in fact presided over 60,000 deaths.’”

Scientific evidence confirms that life begins at conception. In the case of human conception, this means human life has begun. Therefore, to abort at any point is to take a human life. There are complications to the argument, such as those regarding rape, or the health of the mother; but however we reason through these issues, we cannot disregard that abortion is the killing of a defenseless human being. This must be the primary and ultimate consideration, for it is the most dangerous one to ignore.