You know the pro-abort crowd is running scared...

... when it starts fretting about the deep and unsolvable carpooling crises that would be caused by acknowledging that human life and "personhood" do in fact begin at conception:

And it's not just medical questions raised by personhood laws. Would pregnant women be counted as two people for the purposes of using carpool lanes on the highway? Could fetuses inherit property?

Wow, those are heavy questions. How much better to error on the side of destroying human life! The quote is from the conclusion of an NPR piece, "Abortion Foes Push To Redefine Personhood", which reports:

The question being raised in legal terms is: When does someone become a person?

The answer varies under the law. "The definition of personhood ranges if you're talking about property law, or inheritance, or how the census is taken," says Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union's Reproductive Freedom Project.

All those differences are exactly what Keith Mason wants to change. He's president of Personhood USA, a group that's trying to rewrite the laws and constitutions of every state — and some countries — to recognize someone as a person "exactly at creation," he says. "It's fertilization; it's when the sperm meets the egg."

Which begs the question: If someone really is a person and yet, for whatever reason, isn't recognized as such, shouldn't such an injustice be rectified? The NPR piece seems to take the position that Mason is simply going to create a lot of legal headaches for people, as though he is some sort of crank. But it's also evident that the pro-abort/pro-contraception crowd doesn't want reality to get in the way of their "reproductive justice". And, as Dr. Francis J. Beckwith demonstrates quite well in Defending Life (Cambridge, 2007), the supposed debate about when when a new human life begins has been over for a long time, regardless of what Nancy Pelosi might say. For example, Beckwith notes that in testimony given before a Senate Judiciary Committee thirty years ago, numerous medical authorities, professors, and physicians were unanimous way back then in saying that a new human life begins at conception. The French geneticist Jerome L. LeJeune said in his testimony: "To accept the fact that after fertilization has taken place a new human has come into being is no longer a matter of taste or opinion." (Of course, he wasn't mindful of the completely objective tastes and super-reasonable opinions of NPR, was he?) And, to take a more recent example, the textbook, Human Embryology and Teratology (Wiley-Liss, 2001; third edition), states:

It needs to be emphasized that life is continuous, as is also human life, so that the question, "When does (human) life begin?" is meaningless in terms of ontogeny. Although life is a continuous process, fertilization (which, incidentally, is not a "moment") is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is formed when the chromosones of the male and female pronuclei blend in the oocyte." (p. 2).

In other words, not only does the process of fertilization/conception result in a new human life, referring to this new life as a mass of cells or a clump of tissue is completely opposed to scientific, medical fact: "a new, genetically distinct human organism is formed...". But that doesn't stop the author of the NPR piece from throwing up some of the usual smoke screens:

But while that fertilized egg may or may not signal the beginning of personhood, there's one thing it definitely does not begin. Medically, at least, fertilization does not mark the beginning of pregnancy.

"The medical community has really been quite clear about when pregnancy begins," says Dan Grossman, an obstetrician/gynecologist at the University of California, San Francisco, "and that definition is that pregnancy begins once implantation occurs."

That would be the implantation of the fertilized egg into the woman's uterus. One reason doctors don't consider a woman pregnant until after implantation is a practical one — that's when pregnancy can be detected by hormone changes in her urine.

The fact that fertilization happens before a pregnancy begins/implantation occurs is really neither here nor there, but it is a common ploy to throw people off track of the essential issue. The fact is, if a human being exists once fertilization takes place, it exists. Period. Trying to qualify it by saying or suggesting that it doesn't really exist until it is known via a pregnancy test is an obviously weak argument. As Beckwith notes, "it is not essential to your existence as a human being whether anyone knows you exist, for you are who you are regardless of whether others are aware of your existence. One interacts with a human being, one does not make a being human by interacting with it." (p. 73).

The NPR piece than moves on to the second objection (in the same order that Beckwith addresses them in his book):

But there's another reason, Grossman says. "It's really only about half of those fertilized eggs [that] actually result in an ongoing pregnancy."

The rest of the fertilized eggs either never begin dividing or never implant. Or they do implant but spontaneously abort. That can happen so early in pregnancy that the woman never even knows she was pregnant.

So from a medical point of view, considering every fertilized egg a person, with a person's full rights, wouldn't make a lot of sense, he says.

This is an especially illogical tact for, as Beckwith notes, "it does not logically follow from the number of unborn entities who die [by miscarriage or 'spontaneous abortion'] that these entities are by nature not human beings who have begun their existence." He points out that playing such a numbers game ignores a basic fact: "all human beings who are conceived die." Does this mean, therefore, that none of these—regardless of when they perish—are human beings?

There is more, including some hand-wringing over what this all means for those who use contraceptives. Of course, the connection between contraceptives and abortion is fairly obvious to anyone who has eyes to see, as Pope Paul VI did and as Pope John Paul II pointed out many times. But, really, doesn't all of that pale in comparison to questions about carpools?

On Ignatius Insight: