Did you ever play the game “What’s wrong with this picture?” This is a game where you look at two similar pictures and try to determine what is different in them. We can do this in real life as well. For example let’s look at this recent news story:
PROVO, Utah (Reuters) – A Utah mother accused of killing six of her newborn infants over a decade and stashing their bodies in a garage was charged on Monday with murder in their deaths. – Yahoo News (Reuters)
A woman kills six newborn babies and charged with murder. If found guilty she could get up to six life sentences. We don’t yet know why she did it, she has three other children, one of which was born during the time she was killing the others. People are outraged, some even calling for the death penalty. Clearly this was a despicable act and the woman should be punished.
What’s the other picture we need to look at?
STATE-LEVEL DATA (UTAH)
Total Abortions (2011): 3,386
The Utah Department of Health reports that 3,386 abortions took place in Utah during 2011.
SOURCE: Utah Department of Health
Abortion is legal in the United States. A woman can have an abortion and she will not be arrested or charged with anything. Therefore if this Utah mother had aborted the six babies she would have been well within her rights. Does anyone else see a problem with this?
The government’s own definition attests to the fact that life begins at fertilization. According to the National Institutes of Health, “fertilization” is the process of union of two gametes (i.e., ovum and sperm) “whereby the somatic chromosome number is restored and the development of a new individual is initiated.” Thus, in the context of human life, a new individual human organism is initiated at the union of ovum and sperm. One textbook similarly explains: Human development begins at fertilization when a male gamete or sperm (spermatozoon) unites with a female gamete or oocyte (ovum) to produce a single cell – a zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marked the beginning of each of us as a unique individual. – LifeNews.com
Why is killing a baby okay in one case but not in the other? Either way there is the same result, six lives have been ended. Why do we let the law decide when only God has the right to determine who lives and dies?
Think about it.
The Wayward Catholic 
Actually though Catholic bloggers and priests and pundits are going for the gold medal only and not the silver or the bronze when it comes to how early abortion starts. That could turn off millions of more educated people in the world. The NIH is not correct that an individual starts at fertilization and the word totipotential in their last sentence is the key to why they are incorrect.
For c.14 days the cells in the cell mass are totipotential and uncommitted to a role in an individual. That’s why the cell mass can be teased now scientifically into dividing into identical twins. Try teasing your uncle into dividing into twins while he’s eating an arugula salad. Or try teasing a fetus into twinning. It won’t work because a fetus is an individual. The cell mass up til day 14 is not. and be glad it’s not because we have many Catholic women who gain too much weight and obesity inhibits implantation and often obesity is a choice and not simply hormonal or glandular. So where it is a choice, are we going to tell women they are murdering pre implantation tiny people by their choice of eating beyond real physical need? The birth control pill who graduated from our best schools in the US are putting 2 and 2 together. Are we calling them murderers and refusing to call our obese women murderers because they are using NFP but are still inhibiting implantation? Neither are murderers. Til day 14 the cell mass can divide into twins etc. Ergo one person was not there all along. There are IQ bandwidths below 120 etc. that will follow the lower clergy into this new extremism. But why aren’t Popes ( as opposed to lower clergy) talking monthly and publically that the birth control pill is murder. Why didn’t Benedict talk like that monthly? If it’s really murder, why haven’t the last three Popes shouted it from their media access? Because Popes are more cautious against extremism within complex subjects. They remember Saints declaring entire towns guilty of usury for centuries. Then in 1830, the Vatican gave permission to take moderate interest on personal loans…just like Calvin had permitted in 1545. Popes know our record of going too far. We burned 5000 heretics from 1253 til 1700 and now those heretics change our tires or transplant our hearts and we trust them thus with our lives. Popes know our record of going too far.
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We can argue about whether life begins at conception or two weeks or two months later. The point of the post is if this woman had aborted her children nothing would have happened to her. You don’t see the hypocrisy in this?
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Yes I see the hypocrisy in that specific observation of the post. But the post also cites the Life Site passage that goes into what I addressed.
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