Abortion: the Invention of Personhood and Death Innocent

What is the life inside the womb?Everything turns on that one question. If the answer is a human being, then abortion ends the life of an innocent human being, and no softer word will change it. If it is not, there is nothing here worth arguing about.Science has already answered. A new human being begins at fertilization: a whole, living, self-directing organism, distinct from his mother, carrying a complete genetic identity that has never existed before and will never exist again. This is not a religious claim. It is embryology, and it is not seriously disputed.So the argument moved. Unable to deny the humanity of the unborn, it denied him something else, a status called personhood. A category no laboratory has ever found. A line no two people draw in the same place. A distinction invented after the science closed the only door that mattered.Here the case is set out as an argument, premise by premise, in the open where anyone can test it: - All human beings bear the image of God and therefore possess inherent moral worth.- All human beings come into existence at fertilization.- It is always immoral to intentionally kill an innocent bearer of that worth.- The unborn are innocent.Grant the premises and the conclusion is not merely likely, or reasonable, or worth a hearing. It is unavoidable.Every premise is then defended against the objections actually raised against it: the appearance of the embryo, twinning, the arbitrariness of every personhood line ever proposed, Judith Jarvis Thomson's violinist and the demand for bodily autonomy, and the hard cases that keep thoughtful people awake, including the mother whose life is at risk, the child conceived by rape, and the devastating diagnosis. None is answered with a slogan. Each is answered from the principles already established, because the principle drives the practice.Written first to the Christian, who already holds every premise the conclusion requires, and who will find that every door he might reach for is one he sealed himself with his own confession. Offered honestly to the reader who believes none of it, who is welcome here and owed a straight account of where his own premises lead.It closes where it has to close: with grace for those who have already made the decision it argues against.