Notes:

1. The science of embryology establishes that from the earliest stages of development, the unborn are distinct, living, and whole human beings. True, they have yet to grow and mature, but they are whole human beings nonetheless. Leading embryology textbooks affirm this.¹ For example, in The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology Keith L. Moore & T.V.N. Persaud write: “A zygote is the beginning of a new human being. Human development begins at fertilization, the process during which a male gamete or sperm…unites with a female gamete or oocyte…to form a single cell called a zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marks the beginning of each of us as a unique individual.” T.W. Sadler’s Langman’s Embryology states: “The development of a human begins with fertilization, a process by which the spermatozoon from the male and the oocyte from the female unite to give rise to a new organism, the zygote.” Embryologists Ronan O’Rahilly and Fabiola Müller write, “Although life is a continuous process, fertilization is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is thereby formed.”
2. That elective abortion kills a living human fetus is conceded by many who perform and defend the practice:

• • Dr. Warren Hern, author of Abortion Practice—to a Planned Parenthood conference: “We have reached a point in this particular technology [D&E abortion] where there is no possibility of denying an act of destruction. It is before one’s eyes. The sensations of dismemberment flow through the forceps like an electric current.”²
  • Editorial in California Medicine, 9/70—“Since the old ethic has not yet been fully displaced it has been necessary to separate the idea of abortion from the idea of killing, which continues to be socially abhorrent. The result has been a curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous whether intra-or extra-uterine until death. The very considerable semantic gymnastics which are required to rationalize abortion as anything but taking a human life would be ludicrous if they were not often put forth under socially impeccable auspices. It is suggested that this schizophrenic sort of subterfuge is necessary because while a new ethic is being accepted the old one has not yet been rejected.”³
  • Ronald Dworkin, in Life’s Dominion—Abortion deliberately kills a developing embryo and is a choice for death.⁴
  • Faye Wattleton, former President of Planned Parenthood—“I think we have deluded ourselves into believing that people don’t know that abortion is killing. So any pretense that abortion is not killing is a signal of our ambivalence, a signal that we cannot say yes, it kills a fetus.”⁵
  • Naomi Wolf, a prominent feminist author and abortion supporter, in The New Republic—“Clinging to a rhetoric about abortion in which there is no life and no death, we entangle our beliefs in a series of self-delusions, fibs and evasions. And we risk becoming precisely what our critics charge us with being: callous, selfish and casually destructive men and women who share a cheapened view of human life…we need to contextualize the fight to defend abortion rights within a moral framework that admits that the death of a fetus is a real death.”⁶
  • Camille Paglia, feminist—“Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue.”⁷
  • Anthony Kennedy, Supreme Court Justice and abortion supporter—“The fetus, in many cases, dies just as a human adult or child would: it bleeds to death as it is torn from limb to limb….The fetus can be alive at the beginning of the dismemberment process and can survive for a time while its limbs are being torn off….Dr. [Leroy] Carhart [the abortionist who challenged Nebraska’s partial“birth ban] has observed fetal heartbeat . . . with “extensive parts of the fetus removed,”…and testified that mere dismemberment of a limb does not always cause death because he knows of a physician who removed the arm of a fetus only to have the fetus go on to be born “as a living child with one arm.” At the conclusion of a D&E abortion…the abortionist is left with “a tray full of pieces.”⁸

¹ See T.W. Sadler, Langman’s Embryology, 5th ed. (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1993) p. 3; Keith L. Moore, The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Company, 1998),pp. 2-18. O’Rahilly, Ronand and Muller, Pabiola, Human Embryology and Teratology, 2nd ed. (New York: Wiley-Liss, 1996) pp. 8, 29.

² Paper presented at the 1978 meeting of the Association of Planned Parenthood Physicians, October 26. http://www.drhern.com/pdfs/staffrx.pdf

³ “A New Ethic for Medicine and Society,”California Medicine, September 1970.

⁴ Ronald Dworkin, Life’s Dominion: An Argument About Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom (New York: Vintage, 1994) p. 3.

⁵ Faye Wattleton, “Speaking Frankly,” Ms., May / June 1997, Volume VII, Number 6, 67.

⁶ Naomi Wolf, “Our Bodies, Our Souls,” The New Republic, October 16, 1995, 26

⁷ Camille Paglia, “Fresh Blood for the Vampire,” Salon, September 10, 2008.

⁸ Stenberg v. Carhart, 2000.