We Should Not Consider Conception to Equal Fully Human (ContributorNetwork)

COMMENTARY | The Republican Party presidential hopefuls hold anti-choice positions, according to the Associated Press. The view that human life begins at conception is a common explanation offered. Is it scientifically supportable to say fertilization equals humanity? I say it's not. Here are the facts.

The first five days after fertilization see an egg dividing from the time it is a zygote (1 fertilized cell) until it becomes a blastocyst (about 150 cells), according to the National Institute of Health. Zygotes and blastocysts look kind of blobby to me -- not at all like a people.

It's hard to imagine the scale of things we can't see, so I had to do some research to put it into terms I could visualize better. I started with something small but easy to picture -- an ant.

The brain of a carpenter ant contains about 100,000 cells and is about 1/100th of the half-inch length of the ant, according to a University of Virginia study. Newborn humans average 20 inches in length, according to World Book. With that information and a little math we can develop a more useful comparison.

Assume a blastocyst is the size of a newborn human. A carpenter ant proportioned similarly would be about 5.25 miles long. The same comparison using the zygote would make the ant a horror-movie-worthy monstrosity 790 miles long.

Hopefully, that helps you see that zygotes and blastocysts are really tiny. Believing the cells should be considered human from the instant of fertilization would mean those tiny blobs are people. Having seen what they look like I can't justify calling them that.

On top of that I can't justify anti-choice thinking in this case. That little blob can't even think. How can it be more valuable than the life, or will, of the actual woman in whom it's floating around?

I don't claim to have all the answers. That said, it seems unreasonable to place the survival of a zygote or blastocyst ahead of the well-being of someone we all agree is a person -- the pregnant woman. In light of that I have to disagree with the position of all the candidates who argue that life begins at conception.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/gop/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ac/20120124/pl_ac/10879459_we_should_not_consider_conception_to_equal_fully_human

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