The COVID-19 crisis has brought about an unprecedented consensus in modern society around the value of human life and how priceless it is.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently made the case that saving life, all life, comes above all else: “My mother is not expendable, and your mother is not expendable. And our brothers and sisters, they’re not expendable. And we’re not going to accept a premise that human life is disposable, and we’re not going to put a figure on human life. The first order of business is save lives, period. Whatever it cost.”
Cuomo’s bold statement in favor of life indicates that we are united in protecting human life at all costs, to an extent that most living people have never witnessed.
We have been asked to surrender our freedoms and autonomy, our ”liberty,” to allow our businesses to go under, our economy to be driven into a potential depression, and our children to be kept out of schools, all in order to protect “Life” — human life.
These are staggering and still not fully determined costs that are touching each and every one of us. None of us could have imagined just a few weeks ago the price we would collectively be willing to pay to save human life. And yet here we are, week after week showing that defense of life is the first of all priorities. The right to life has always been a core American value, but saving human lives is the only metric that matters right now.
More telling, we are doing this not only because we fear how COVID-19 might impact us individually, but also out of a profound desire to protect the health and the well-being of the most vulnerable among us: those with underlying medical conditions and the elderly, who are statistically the most likely to succumb to this cruel virus. Every day this country is shut down, is another day we are standing (or staying home) in defense of those not strong enough to survive a virus that spreads and kills indiscriminately.
As we unite around our renewed “life” consensus, it is important we are aware of the scientifically accurate definition of the start of a human life, lest we exclude some humans. The universal and undisputed agreement among human embryologists, the only experts who specialize in when a human life starts, is that all sexually reproduced human beings begin to exist at fertilization, at “first contact” between the oocyte (egg) and sperm, the female and male reproductive cells.
This objective, empirical fact of the biological science of human embryology has been known and documented in the Carnegie Stages of Human Embryonic Development since 1942, required knowledge in every genuine human embryology textbook worldwide. The new, whole, individual and living human being, known as a human embryo during the first eight weeks of his or her existence, immediately produces enzymes and proteins that only a whole human being can produce. The biological facts demonstrate that a human embryo or a human fetus is a real human being with a truly human nature.
Considering the unprecedented restrictions and sacrifices that Americans are accepting to preserve human lives, it screams the question of why do some people continue to treat pre-born human beings differently? Birth is simply a developmental milestone of an already existing human being. Why are we failing to protect all individual members of our species?
In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court arbitrarily decided that a “person” is a being “capable of an independent existence,” thus determining that “personhood” was dependent on “viability.” As we rush to produce ventilators to save victims of COVID-19 who would not survive or be capable of “independent existence” without them, it becomes painfully obvious that “viability” is not a precondition for human life or for personhood.
Americans are racing to save human lives due to the intrinsic value of human beings, not measuring one’s humanity in terms of an individual’s capacity to breathe or feel pain.
More, we have always only had freedom to the point of not harming others. That is, I can’t use my body to injure another human being. Yet, the Guttmacher Institute counted 862,000 abortions in the United States in 2017. We can no longer argue that saving those human lives would have required too much sacrifice in terms of individual liberty. America’s decisions and priorities in fighting the current pandemic clearly reflect a fundamental belief that the value of safeguarding human life far outweighs an individual’s right to personal freedom and autonomy.
This virus reminds us that protecting human life is the essence of America. While we live through all these sacrifices to save lives, we should be asking ourselves why our sacrifices do not extend equally to human beings at all stages of life.
Christiane West is the head of partnerships at Contend Projects, a registered 501(c)(3) education organization spreading the basic, accurate scientific facts about when a human life starts and the biological science of human embryology.
