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When an Egg is Not a Chicken [1]
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Date: 2025-04-07
While our minds are on authoritarianism and the destruction of democracy, we haven't been thinking much about the not-so-distant-future attempt to ban abortion nationwide. That form of tyranny will undoubtedly come soon. The Senate should be able to hold it off with the filibuster, but you never know what dirty tactics Republicans will use to cram it through. Or how Trump will threaten to cut off all federal aid to any state that doesn't ban it. It seems crazy that they would completely ignore the vast majority of Americans who believe in the right to abortion, but crazy is where Republicans have taken up residency.
This is a letter I wrote to a friend who is adamantly opposed to abortion. This person said that he/she simply couldn't understand how I could support the murder of babies. I responded thusly:
Here are my thoughts on abortion.
For me, it all boils down to when we should consider that rapidly dividing clump of cells a human being. Scientists, doctors, nurses, philosophers, theologians, and many others have thought about it, considered it, written about it, discussed it, and debated it for a few thousand years. There has been no agreement. Even today, when more scientists say that life technically begins at conception, since the fertilized egg immediately has all of its genetic material, the question still remains: when do we consider that living clump of cells a human being?
The only ones who seem to have a definitive answer are right-wing American Christians. I say that because, while just about every European country is one variation of Christian or another, abortion isn’t much of an issue over there. Whether Catholic or some branch of Protestant Christian, most Europeans don’t see removal of that clump of cells as “baby-killing.” Nor do I.
Those cells certainly have the potential to become a human being, but as far as I’m concerned, they don’t qualify. When do they become a human being? I don’t know, as people haven’t known for many centuries. When they have a beating heart? When they have a brain? When they look like something other than a little reptile? When they can feel pain? When they can live outside the womb? Three months? Six months?
Since many of those markers seem pretty arbitrary, you and other fundamentalists are forced into the only real option open to you – at conception. Right? A strong anti-abortionist can’t really pick one of those other spots – heartbeat, brain, number of months, etc. – so they have to fall back on the only thing that isn’t based on the arbitrary opinions of humans – that moment when the sperm hits the egg and the cells begins to multiply.
But I, and most people in the world, don’t see that clump of cells as a human being. When a frightened young woman heads into a Planned Parenthood office and is met with taunts and screams of “Whore,” “Sinner,” and “Baby killer,” I don’t buy it for a second. That clump of cells isn’t a baby. It’s no more a “baby” than a watermelon seed is a watermelon, or an egg is a chicken.
My girlfriend for much of high school and all of college was named ______. ______ undoubtedly remembers her. Her mom was one of the “early adopters” when it came to health-food, and in the 70s there was an idea that fertile eggs were more healthy than regular ones. She’d periodically make a trip to the local health food store for fertile eggs and other items. Now, if you take a regular egg, wrap it in a blanket, and place it under a heat lamp, nothing will happen; that egg will not produce a chick. If you do that to a fertile egg, however, under the right conditions a little chick will eventually hatch. But here’s the point: when ______ mom went to that store, she came home with a dozen eggs – not a dozen chickens. And throwing one of those eggs against a wall would be destruction of an egg – not the killing of a chicken.
So too with whales or chimps or, yes, humans. Don’t get stuck on our shared belief that a human life is worth much more than a chicken’s; I’m not equating the value of a human egg’s potential to that of a chicken’s. The point is that the little clump of cells that will become a chicken isn’t yet a chicken, and the little clump of cells that will become a human being isn’t yet a human being. It isn’t a baby. It’s nothing more than clump of cells that has the potential to be a baby.
If it was a baby the second a sperm entered the egg, I’d be with you. I don’t think that anyone has the right to kill another, so if that clump of cells was a child, then removing it would be murder and I’d be against it. The choice of a woman to control her own body would not give her the right to commit murder; nobody gets to choose murder. But it isn’t murder, because doing away with potential is nowhere near the same thing as doing away with an actuality.
I imagine that an argument against my position would be that some women get abortions when the fetus is more than a clump of cells; it may have a heartbeat and look more like a person than a reptile. But you can’t use that argument, ______, because you’ve already painted yourself into the “it’s a human being at the moment of conception” corner. If the clump of cells is a “baby” at conception, then it doesn’t really matter when a woman gets an abortion; from Day 1 to Day 180 (or whatever), you see it as murder. If you didn’t, there might be some room for discussion and compromise. Though some would claim that a woman can do whatever she wants and that there should be no restriction on abortion, I think that there are many, myself included, that would be open to some limitations.
But you don’t want that. Your movement sees no ground upon which to compromise. How can it?! If a fertilized egg is a “baby,” and that baby will become a child, then abortion is murder. So, while anti-abortionists see women who demand reproductive freedom as radicals, it’s really the other way around. It’s your “side” that sees things in terms of black and white, right and wrong, good and evil. You’ve called Democratic politicians who support reproductive rights evil. I find that extreme and, to my way of thinking, just plain wrong.
The other piece that I wonder about relates to the idea of a “soul.” I assume that your religious beliefs lead you to think that God provides a soul at the moment the sperm hits the egg. Is that true? Do you believe in a soul, does it come from God, and does God bestow it on each human being at the moment of conception? If I believed that, I’d have an easier time considering the clump of cells a person. But I don’t believe it for a minute. Just as I don’t believe that Jesus was the son of God, or that there was a Garden of Eden or an ark with all of the world’s animal species represented. You may believe all of that, but belief doesn’t make it true. Even certainty doesn’t make it true.
So, anyway, to summarize, my fundamental disagreement with you is that I don’t believe that an egg cell with a sperm in it is a baby, so I don’t for one second consider its removal a murder.
Beyond that basic belief, however, I have real problems with the seeming unwillingness of anti-abortionists to put one iota of energy into helping young women keep from getting pregnant. There would be an easy fix, ______, that didn’t involve trampling the rights of a solid majority of Americans. It’s called sex education and access to contraception. In most European countries (I use them because they’re closer to us in history and culture), young people can get birth control much more easily than in the US. Guess what? Pregnancy rates are lower. Abortion rates are lower.
By embracing sex ed and access to birth control, your anti-abortion forces could probably “save” a few hundred thousand “slaughtered babies” per year. But you won’t do that, for two reasons. First, you erroneously assume that sex education and access to contraception will lead to an increase in sexual activity. Research clearly shows the opposite:
“Research consistently shows that comprehensive sex education programs and access to contraception do not lead to an increase in sexual activity among young people. Instead, these programs are associated with positive outcomes such as delaying the onset of sexual activity, reducing the frequency of intercourse, reducing the number of sexual partners, and increasing the use of condoms and other contraceptives2.
Comprehensive sex education provides young people with accurate, age-appropriate information about sexuality and sexual health, helping them make informed and responsible decisions. Access to contraception further supports these positive behaviors by enabling young people to practice safer sex and reduce the risk of unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections4. In summary, rather than increasing sexual activity, sex education and access to contraception equip young people with the knowledge and tools they need to make healthier choices.”
The incorrect belief that sexual activity will increase melds nicely with your corresponding belief that sex before marriage is a sin. You don’t want young people to engage in this “sinful” activity, so you refuse to give them the tools to keep girls/women from getting pregnant, and possibly having an abortion. You fall back on the old, utterly unreliable practice of advocating abstinence. I’ll grant you that in your conservative religious environment, “Just Say No” might work better than it does for the general population. But my guess is also that there are girls within your church community that have become pregnant and secretly had an abortion.
From all this, I have to ask the questions: isn’t the possible “sin” of sex before marriage far less repugnant to you than what you consider to be the mass murder of babies? Rather than work ferociously to do away with a right that the vast majority of Americans support, wouldn’t it be better to spend your time and effort creating a culture in which pregnancy is less likely?
Finally, I have to say that anti-abortionists have done a very poor job of improving the adoption process, and helping young women through it. They have also made it clear that, being political conservatives, they have no interest in having their precious tax dollars be used by the government to help out poor women and children. The prevailing Evangelical belief seems to be that charity within their religious communities is fine, but government expenditures amount to nothing more than unnecessary giveaways to undeserving social parasites. (Since Jesus obviously advocated for the poor, and there are countless biblical passages that call for helping the least capable, I assume that there must be one or two lines amongst the approximately 1,500 pages of the old and new testaments that justify right-wing positions on “welfare.”).
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