By Judie Brown
The simple fact that every human being has a similar beginning as a single cell fertilized egg seems to be more than some people can comprehend. This came into stark focus when we read Professor Risa Cromer’s article entitled “Embryo Personhood’s IVF Problem: What the Data Reveals.”
Cromer closes her article with the statement:
Conservative Christian legal advocacy built the legal framework of embryo personhood from convictions about the sanctity of life. But that framework is colliding with a reproductive technology that many within the same communities rely on to build families. Alabama marked the first major conflict between personhood policy and IVF, though it is unlikely to be the last. As embryo personhood provisions spread, the question is no longer whether the religious principle will shape reproductive policy, but how far its consequences will reach.
Several problematic inventions exist in Cromer’s insights. First among them is the fact that human physiology is not a religious tenet, it is the science of the study of the human body, its development, and its very existence.
Second, the development of the human embryo, who is a human being, is a fact affirmed in the study of human embryology. The Carnegie stages of human development make that very clear and have done so for many years.
It is science that teaches the development of a human being, who is a person from his or her beginning. Reflect on the fact that Homo sapiens means humankind, humankind is all of humanity, and all of humanity includes the preborn baby.
This may read like an oversimplification of the obvious, but we are dealing with people who spend a great deal of time redefining words in an effort to advance their inhumane agenda on any number of fronts. For example, one headline reads “US Saw More Than 1.12 Million Abortions in 2025, but Actual Figures Likely Higher.” The article quotes researcher Mia Steupert of the Charlotte Lozier Institute, who said that “there’s also no way you can track abortions occurring outside the formal health care system.”
But what the article does not address are the number of abortions carried out in in vitro fertilization labs where thousands of human embryos are flushed away for a wide variety of reasons. Nor does the article address early-days abortions caused by various birth control methods.
It occurs to me that with such inconsistencies on the subject of human personhood abounding in the medical, biological, and philosophical fields, it is impossible to know exactly how many people have died prior to birth. This is why we refuse to go down the statistical rabbit hole.
We know that every single human being, regardless of how he came into being, is a child of God, endowed with a soul and precious to the Lord. God does not endow each of His children with a soul so that they can become science experiments, spare parts factories, or sterile receptacles of any sort. Each human being is a unique individual who is indeed a person deserving of our respect, our advocacy, and our warrior efforts to protect them.
And as we strive to protect them, let us keep Saint Paul’s uplifting message to the Philippians on our mind and in our hearts: “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Keep on doing what you have learned and received and heard and seen in me. Then the God of peace will be with you.”