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Nothing is more integral to the pro-abortion mantra than the backhanded
dismissal of the young human embryo. “That’s a human being?” they
sneer. To remind them that this is what all of us once looked like
makes no dent in their belief that if the human embryo does not “look”
like a baby then it's just a "blob of cells". However, with new technology like four dimensional full-color ultrasounds, it’s getting downright intellectually embarrassing to dismiss a mature unborn baby as a “blob of cells.” Thus, the last refuge for the pro-aborts is the very early human embryo. Surely, they say, at least this qualifies as nothing more than a “blob of cells.” Indeed, most scientists believed “that the embryo's cells were only assigned specific roles between the sixth and ninth days of development, at about the time of implantation into the uterine wall.” The English journal Nature counters this belief with the statement: “Your world was shaped in the first 24 hours after conception. Where your head and feet would sprout, and which side would form your back and which your belly, were being defined in the minutes and hours after sperm and egg united.” By tagging specific points on a human ovum just after fertilization, Dr.Richard Gardner has discovered that “they come to be at predictable points on the embryo.” Within that first 24 hours, the newly fertilized egg determines where the head will be, where feet will sprout, and indeed which side will be the belly and which side the back. Gardner, an embryologist at the University of Oxford, was able to safely inject oil drops into a two-cell embryo that showed up as markers in the blastocyst, demonstrating conclusively “that a specific point on the fertilized egg consistently maps to a particular position on the embryo.” He also discovered that four and five-day-old embryos are not a symmetrical sphere “but have an identifiable head-tail axis that corresponds to that of the fetus.” “What is clear,” Nature writes, “is that developmental biologists will no longer dismiss early mammalian embryos as featureless bundles of cells.” We’ve lived long enough to see science more fully acknowledge what’s been known for centuries. Our unborn brothers and sisters are wonderfully made. They deserve not mistreatment for their powerlessness but awe for their magnificent complexity. |