Abortion advocate and biology professor P. Z. Myers has an incredibly difficult time covering up the fact that human life begins at conception and that abortion always kills a human being. In a recent post, he wrote:

Can I just say that the claim that “life begins at conception” is sufficiently absurd in all of its particulars that anyone who says it needs to be laughed off the stage? Life doesn’t “begin” at conception, and the question is not whether the focus is on life (it’s not, or these same people would be against the death penalty and eating meat or any living thing at all), it’s about when human personhood begins, which is a much fuzzier and poorly delimited thing altogether. Except we know it doesn’t happen at conception.

Obviously, life begins at conception. With the fusion of the sperm and the egg, a new human life begins. This is rudimentary biology — it has been settled science since the early 19th century. From a biological standpoint, it can’t be denied. After all, if life begins sometime after conception (e.g., at viability, or sentience, or whatever), then biologists would face the problem of classifying the fetus prior to life. A fetus isn’t part of the mother, because it has different DNA (and half the time, different sex) and women don’t reproduce by budding — i.e., they don’t just bud off parts of their bodies like earthworms. If the fetus is a non-human species and becomes human at viability, then the fetus is a parasite (and pregnancy is a parasitic disease) and we witness evolution with speciation with each pregnancy — human life evolves from a parasite with each pregnancy!

Why Deny the Obvious?

The fact that life begins at conception is as much settled science as heliocentrism and the fact that the heart pumps blood. Why would Myers — a biology professor — deny something this obvious?

He denies that life begins at conception because the fact that life begins at conception makes his ideology — he enthusiastically supports abortion — harder to sell. His personhood argument depends critically on when life begins. Abortion proponents must deny the personhood of these very young human beings in order to justify abortion. But denying the personhood of any human being is morally abhorrent, so pro-abortion fanatics like Myers lie about the biology of early human life to paint a pretty face on homicide of human beings in the womb. 

Myers is a professor of biology and should know damn well when life begins. But he seeks to advance his ideology, and therefore misleads. It’s the same way he and other Darwinists mislead about the evidence for design in living things. They have an ideology to sell, and if truth gets in the way, so much the worse for truth.