People often accuse pro-life voters as being “single-issue” voters. I think at times they are actually correct. I think it is more accurate to say that they are “single-issue dominant” voters. Obviously if two candidates were your choices for office and they espoused identical views on the life issue, other issues gain importance.
I think if you ever accept that human life begins at conception, you effectively have almost no choice, if you are consistent in your thinking in making it a central issue, if not the central issue in your voting.
If you are on the fence on this issue at all, a good summary of the life issue appears here. Robert P. George of Princeton sums up the issue quite succinctly:
Treating the question as some sort of grand mystery, or expressing or feigning uncertainty about it, may be politically expedient, but it is intellectually indefensible. Modern science long ago resolved the question. We actually know when the life of a new human individual begins.
A recently published white paper, “When does human life begin? A scientific perspective,” offers a thorough discussion of the facts of human embryogenesis and early development, and its conclusion is inescapable: From a purely biological perspective, scientists can identify the point at which a human life begins. The relevant studies are legion. The biological facts are uncontested. The method of analysis applied to the data is universally accepted.
Your life began, as did the life of every other human being, when the fusion of egg and sperm produced a new, complete, living organism — an embryonic human being. You were never an ovum or a sperm cell, those were both functionally and genetically parts of other human beings — your parents. But you were once an embryo, just as you were once an adolescent, a child, an infant, and a fetus. By an internally directed process, you developed from the embryonic stage into and through the fetal, infant, child, and adolescent stages of development and ultimately into adulthood with your determinateness, unity, and identity fully intact. You are the same being — the same human being — who once was an embryo..
If we value human beings by virtue of their being human, we are left with no choice but to afford these humans protection. If we do not, we trash the very rights our founding fathers refer to in our historic documents.
That’s why the abortion issue is such a litmus test for those in the pro-life crowd. The answer to the question of when life begins settles the issue.
