.png){kind=small}
"I'm not just pro-choice or pro-life; I Respect People."
Tip for using this website:
Underlined words are hyperlinked to reference sources and/or additional information. If you are unfamiliar with hyperlinks, try clicking on a couple of underlined words.
1. When did your life begin?
"When did your life begin?" is the first of three questions that will end the abortion debate. To be clear, the fact that this question is listed first doesn't mean that it's more important than the other two questions. All three questions are important, but we look at "When did your life begin?" first because it takes a little time to explain. (In comparison, the other two questions don't require much time.)
​
To understand when a person's life begins, we must first make sure everyone knows the difference between "life" and "person." The definitions of life and person are very different, and knowing the differences between them will bring you great clarity in how it is possible for good people to disagree on the morality of abortion.
Let's start with life. For millennia, people have recognized that life is special and unique compared to inanimate objects. Biology, the study of life, has entranced many minds throughout history; however, it wasn't until the 16th and 17th centuries that biology's popularity exploded from the development of the scientific method, the invention of the microscope, and the discovery of cells.
In the world today, life is identified by the presence of 7 characteristics: organized structure, metabolism, growth, response to stimuli, homeostasis, reproductive capability, and evidence of adaptation through evolution. The cell is the designated smallest unit of life because, in general, a cell exhibits life's 7 characteristics. Cells are living things that compose all living things on our planet—bacteria, plants, animals, and people. You, as a person, are composed of trillions of these individual lives, and by working together harmoniously, these lives within you each perform specific functions to support your life. According to biology, you are alive, and each cell working to keep you alive is alive.
​
At the smallest level, it is important to note that life doesn’t actually begin; it continues. Cells can merge together, and cells can divide themselves. But neither of those two events is a clear beginning or end of a particular cell's life. When cells merge or divide, it would be a stretch to say that a “completely new cell” exists. This is why scientists agree that, in general, life is a continuum.
While scientists agree that life is a continuum, it is also a fact of our world that all living things eventually die. Looking at the smallest unit of life, we know cells die in four main ways: they can die when destroyed by physical forces; they can die when attacked by other cells (or viruses); they can die from senescence (the cell version of old age); and they can die from apoptosis (the cell version of suicide). Within your body, billions of cells die every day, and yet you are still here. This means that your life, as a person, is something beyond the existence of each of your cells.
​
Did you know that each cell in your body is technically a human life? Each cell is a unit of life—hence each human cell is "a life"—and each cell functions from the instructions of human DNA—hence each human cell is "a human." You, as a person, are technically comprised of trillions of human lives! The important thing to grasp here is that "human life" and "person life" are not one and the same.
Because the average person does not hold a Ph.D. in both Biology and Philosophy, it's not surprising that people tend to conflate “human”, which is a biological term, with “person”, which is a philosophical term. Unfortunately, this causes confusion when people talk about abortion. Confusion causes frustration, frustration causes anger, and anger between two groups of people leads to trouble.
The truth is that the concept of what it means to be a person isn't biological. It's philosophical. The video below can give you a crash course on the philosophy of personhood, aka, what it means to be a person. The narrator, Hank Green (co-founder of the free educational channel Crash Course), clearly and impartially describes the difference between human and person . . . hear for yourself by enjoying the video below.
Did you watch the video? If not, know that it's less than 10 minutes long and definitely worth watching. To recap, Hank reviews 5 different definitions of person and notes that our society does not yet have a widely agreed upon definition. None of the existing definitions of person have been able to settle the tension between Pro-Life and Pro-Choice groups. Therefore, we need to establish a new definition.
After watching Hank's Crash Course on Personhood, you should understand that "life," "human life," and "person" are distinct concepts. While each living cell within you is a human life, only you, as the sum of the coordinated function of those human lives, are a human person. This means that the life of any one of your cells and your life, as a person, are two different things. For example, have you ever considered how your future death is not simultaneously the death of all the cells in your body? After your death, cells within the body you left behind can live for days, and certain cells can live for more than two weeks after you're gone, until they run out of energy to consume, since you are no longer there to control that body and eat to provide those cells with nutrients. If you die and become an organ donor, some of the cells with your DNA will live for much longer than two weeks after your passing. Indeed, cells with your exact DNA, that used to be a part of you, can live on within, reproduce within, and be a part of another person. You need your cells, but your cells don't necessarily need you!
Here's the point: If the end of your life is not congruent to the death of all cells with your DNA, then it is reasonable to consider that the beginning of your life is also not congruent to the rise of new cellular life with your DNA. Therefore, to answer the question "When did your life begin?", you must ask yourself what distinguishes your life from the trillions of cellular lives that support you?
We have thought hard about this question, and we arrived at an answer: While we and our cells are both living and have human DNA, we, as people, have something special: the ability to think thoughts and feel emotions!
Thus, Respect People defines a human person as a biological form that meets three criteria: (1) living, (2) human DNA, and (3) the ability to think thoughts and feel emotions. We call this definition the Three Criteria for Human Personhood.
The process of differentiating persons from non-persons can be simplified by acknowledging that the ability to think thoughts and feel emotions occurs from within one specific organ: the brain. Your brain, a magnificent organ, is what permits your life to be extraordinary compared to cellular life. When your brain ceases to function—that is, when your brain ceases to have the ability to think thoughts and feel emotions—your life as a person ends. Likewise, when your brain gained this function—that is, the ability to think thoughts and feel emotions—your life as a person began.
After hearing the Three Criteria for Human Personhood for the first time, some people ask, "How do the Three Criteria measure up to an unconscious person?" The simple answer is that the ability to think thoughts and feel emotions is not the same as consciousness. For example, you can think thoughts and feel emotions while dreaming, but while dreaming you aren't conscious. Furthermore, there is a difference between having an ability and actively using that ability. For instance, someone who has the ability to sing like an angel still has that ability even when they're simply relaxing on a couch and watching TV instead of singing. There is also a difference between having an ability and having a memory of using that ability. Case in point, we do not have memories of every single thought and emotion from when we were two years old, but the fact that we don't remember does not negate the fact that we did have the ability to think thoughts and feel emotions when we were toddlers. This distinction affirms that infants are indeed people (and answers the question, "How do the Three Criteria measure up to infants?"). Likewise, an unconscious person may not remember many thoughts or emotions from the time they were unconscious, just like a person may not remember all of the dreams they had last night, but not remembering is not proof that thoughts were not thought and emotions were not felt. This distinction also affirms that people who have Alzheimer's are, in fact, still people, too. In summary, the ability to think thoughts and feel emotions is a characteristic of all indisputable people because a) it's not contingent on consciousness, b) it's not contingent on active use, and c) it's not contingent on memory of use. What it is contingent on, however, is having a brain. For as long as a person is not brain dead or severely brain-damaged, they'll have the ability to think thoughts and feel emotions. Ultimately, the Three Criteria for Human Personhood is a simple but useful philosophical standard to differentiate persons from non-persons. If a living thing does not have the ability to think thoughts and feel emotions, it is not a person.
Now that we've recognized the main difference between a person and a non-person life form—the ability to think thoughts and feel emotions—we finally can answer the question "When did your life begin?" by investigating when a developing brain gains the ability to think thoughts and feel emotions.
Image Credit: TheVisualMD/Science Source
​
Extraordinary amounts of time and research have been devoted to mapping the timeline of human brain development and to distinguishing which parts of the brain are necessary for thinking thoughts and feeling emotions.
​
-
A great place to start learning about the timeline of fetal brain development is this short excerpt from Dr. Michael S. Gazzaniga's book, The Ethical Brain. Dr. Gazzaniga is the Director of the SAGE Center for the Study of Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara. If for some reason you cannot access the excerpt from the link above, you can access the excerpt in The Ethical Brain's free book sample provided on Amazon.​
-
Another excellent short read about the timeline of fetal brain development is "When Does Consciousness Arise in Human Babies?", a Scientific American magazine article by Dr. Christof Koch, a chief scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
-
The Human Brain Book: An Illustrated Guide to its Structure, Function, and Disorders is a fabulous resource to learn about which-parts-of-the-brain-contribute-to-what as well as basic information on brain development and aging. If you loved going to science museums as a kid, you'll love the illustrations in this book.
-
Some technical readings that discuss fetal brain development include The thalamus: gateway to the mind by Lawrence M. Ward; Can fetuses feel pain? by Stuart W. G. Derbyshire; Fetal Pain: A Systematic Review of the Evidence by Lee, Ralston, and Drey; Fetal Awareness: Review of Research by The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists; and Decoding the neuroscience of consciousness by Emily Sohn.
​
Because brain development happens gradually, there is no single clear point at which we can say, "At this point here is exactly when a new brain has the ability to think thoughts and feel emotions." What we can do, however, is sort through the details of brain development to find a window of time such that before this window, we are confident that a brain does not have the ability to think thoughts or feel emotions, and after this window, we are confident that a brain does have the ability to think thoughts and feel emotions.
Considering the timeline of brain development, the appropriate window for when a new brain gains the ability to think thoughts and feel emotions is 23-27 weeks gestation. There is a part of the brain called the thalamus, and it is located on the top of the brainstem. The thalamus is a gateway through which all sensory information (except smell) passes to reach your cerebral cortex, the part of the brain where you think thoughts and feel emotions. In your brain, the limbic system works along with your cortex to give rise to emotions. Until the thalamus is connected to the cortex, it is not possible for a brain to have thoughts because there is no sensory input about which to think! Likewise, until the thalamus is connected to the cortex, it is not possible for a brain to have emotions because there is no sensory input about which to feel.
To drive home the point that a brain cannot think thoughts or feel emotions without ever having received any sensory input, consider a sensory deprivation tank. If you were to spend time in a sensory deprivation tank, during that time you would be able to think thoughts and feel emotions, but they'd only be based on your memories of past sensory experiences. If a developing brain has yet to develop the infrastructure necessary to receive sensory input, then not only does it have no access to incoming sensory input, but also it has no prior memories of any sensory input about which to think or feel. Only after thalamocortical fibers connect a fetal brain's thalamus to its cortex can it be possible for a fetus to think thoughts and feel emotions. This connection occurs between 23-25 weeks gestation, hence 23 weeks gestation is an exceptionally reasonable start for the time frame of when your mind came into existence. As for the close of this time frame, 28 weeks gestation is a two-fold notable milestone. One, at 28 weeks gestation, fetuses begin to exhibit facial expressions similar to those made by adults experiencing pain. Two, at 28 weeks gestation, synaptic growth in the fetal brain begins to skyrocket, giving rise to the increased brain functionality necessary for full consciousness. As aforementioned, the ability to think thoughts and feel emotions is not the same as consciousness (babies are actually never fully conscious while in the womb because of endogenous sedation), thus, by 28 weeks gestation, when a new brain is capable of, at the least, minimal consciousness, we can say that certainly a new mind exists.
​
It bears repeating that 23-27 weeks gestation is not a specific point in time but instead a window of time that includes weeks 23, 24, 25, 26, and 27. Respect People isn't claiming to know the exact biological moment when your life began because there is currently no scientific evidence that can support such a statement (and perhaps there never will be). While we don't yet know precisely where on the biological timeline your life began, we can tell you, based on available evidence, that your unique, special, precious life began with your first thoughts and emotions somewhere between 23-27 weeks gestation.
​
Then, from 28 weeks gestation to many years after birth, your brain continued to develop its ability to think thoughts and feel emotions to greater heights of sophistication, such as deeper levels of self-awareness, consideration for others, and existential contemplations.
​
Five well-known but problematic depictions of the start of a person's life are:
​
Fertilization
​
Heartbeats
​
The Quickening
​
Viability
​
Birth
These five proposals for the start of a person's life are faulty because they fail to differentiate the essence of what distinguishes persons from non-person life forms. (You can click on each of the five bolded terms above for more information on why each is a poor marker for the start of personhood.)
​
A standard of brain functionality—that is, the ability to think thoughts and feel emotions—is the most reasonable option we have today to merge philosophical, biological, and legal definitions of personhood because it utilizes the roots of what make a person discernable from other forms of life on earth.
​
From 28 weeks gestation, you were an unborn baby in your mother's womb. Before 23 weeks gestation, you did not exist, and within the uterus of your mother-to-be there was an unborn body, not an unborn baby. That unborn body was an empty vessel, that no person had ever existed in, until you came along.
​
For those Americans who value God and the Bible, we agree that yes, the Bible does imply that a person's life begins in the womb at the moment of conception (Luke 1:5-45 and Psalm 139), however, we humbly point out that nowhere in the Bible is it written that conception occurs at fertilization. The assumption that fertilization is conception, and the practice of treating those two words as synonyms, came from the mind of man in the 17th century, when people first discovered that human women had eggs and human men had sperm. Conception means the beginning of a new person or the beginning of a new thought, idea, or "the originating of something in the mind." Fertilization is a biological process that produces a new line of cells that contain half the genetic code found in cells from exactly two other people. Based on the logic and evidence of this page, it is safe to conclude that the assumption that "fertilization is conception" was erroneous, likely due to the lack of advanced scientific data that is available to us now. The time has come for the practice of using conception and fertilization as synonyms to be retired.
​
If, based on new evidence, the scientific community ever updates the point at which a new human mind comes into existence, then the answer to this question will be updated, but for now, the answer to the first question, "When did your life begin?", is between 23-27 weeks gestation.
​
So now you know that your life began when your mind came into existence, but knowing this is only a piece of the big picture of the abortion debate. There are still two other very important questions that must be asked. Luckily, the answers to each of the other two questions are shorter than the first!
