Notes from Evil Bender

Focus on the Fetus Family has a helpful guide about why women should be forced to give birth. You’ve heard their arguments before, so I won’t go into detail on the whole thing. But I couldn’t pass up this gem:

To be human is identifiable by species (homo sapiens) and genetic code. Life, biologically speaking, begins at fertilization. We all began with the same raw materials: an egg and a sperm. We are fully human when these gametes unite at fertilization, as nothing else is added to us—only nourishment and time to grow.

Understand what’s being said. This is a supposedly “Christian” group that says what makes us human is our genetic code and nothing else. That undifferentiated lump of cells that can’t think, can’t react, can’t observe, and can’t feel pleasure or pain*–that lump of cells is human, according to the Focus folks. Never mind the staggering number of souls that must be clogging heaven due to failure to implant, and never mind that those “souls” never had a body or a brain or any experience–never had any of the things we identify with humanness, in other words–that lump of cells is totally deserving of more rights than the woman who is carrying it.

Humans are social creatures. We’ve evolved to crave one another’s company. We need each other, and our long childhoods require us to need complex family structures. And we have those long childhoods in part because of the way our brains evolved. We learn far more than instinct teaches us. In other words, we are much, much more than a mere collection of DNA. And I would be honestly surprised–biologists in my readership, please correct me if I’m wrong–to find scientists who think that humanity begins and ends with homo sapien DNA.

Yet for Focus on the Fetus, all those things, all of our experience and development that make us who we are–that is unimportant. What’s important is that our DNA somehow tells the soul that it’s supposed to hook us up.

And I’m told atheists have a cold, unfeeling view of the value of human life.

*And, for evangelicals, we should note that this also means that “human” fetus can’t sin or choose not to sin, can’t follow Jesus or oppose him, or anything else. It can’t do anything but multiply cells and grow, and it needs the mother to do that!