In many ways, America is evolving into what its framers envisioned as a “more perfect union.” In the last decades, we made great advances in the realms of women’s equality and racial justice. In both of these issues, we look back and ask, “How could a nation get it so wrong for so long?” I considered beginning this column by asking, “Is it possible for a nation to be blind to a critical humanitarian issue?” I then decided our history makes this self-evident.

I think the greatest humanitarian issue facing America today is what President Biden recently called “the unborn child.” After the leaked Supreme Court document, we know that the Court may be on the verge of concluding what the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg felt after Roe v. Wade became the law of the land in 1973: “I think it’s inescapable that the court gave the anti-abortion forces a single target to aim at,” she said in 2013. “The unelected judges decided this question for the country, and never mind that the issue was in flux in the state legislatures.”

For me, the central issue in the abortion debate is this: What is this thing in the womb? Different terms are used. Fetus. Mass of protoplasm. Product of conception. Potential person. Last week, a woman in her 50s made an emotional visit to my office. Verbatim, this is what she said: “Pastor Keith. I don’t think I can go to heaven! When I was 18, I had an abortion. The doctor told me it wasn’t a baby. I was deceived and I’ve felt so guilty ever since.” I explained that Jesus died for our sins. I said that there is no unforgivable sin except unbelief and that if she would repent and believe in Jesus as her Savior, she would most definitely go to heaven.

When does an unborn baby become a human being? Since March of 2020 and the beginning of COVID, reasonable Americans consistently asked the question “What does the science say?” At bare minimum, we must admit that the science is on the side of human life existing very early, not late in one’s pregnancy. At a 1981 Senate subcommittee hearing, Hymie Gordon, Chairman of the Department of Medical Genetics at the Mayo Clinic stated: “By all the criteria of modern molecular biology, life is present from the moment of conception.”

Dr. Jerome Lejeune, Professor of Genetics at the University of Descartes (Paris) observed:

“When does life begin? I will try to give the most precise answer to that question actually available to science … life has a very long history, but each individual has a very real, neat beginning, the moment of its conception … to accept the fact that after fertilization has taken place a new human being has come into being is no longer a matter of taste or opinion. The human nature of the human being, conception to old age, is not a metaphysical contention, it is plain experimental evidence.”

If this is true – and the science says it is – I offer three modest proposals:

• Americans, would you consider viewing the unborn as a class of citizens who need protection? After conception, he/she is a fully human person with unactualized capacities. Science reveals that they do not “become” or “develop” into a person as much as they mature into what they already are. That the unborn is a person is implicit in laws where in some states the murder of a pregnant mother results in two counts of murder.

• Americans, would you consider the inconsistency of our advances in defending the rights of a greater number of Americans while being passive for the rights of the constitutionally protected class of citizens known as unborn children.

• Supreme Court, please do not allow public pressure to erode your resolve to protect this class of American citizens. No legal scholar I’ve heard seems to think that Roe was reasoned solidly. Please continue in the direction of letting the states decide so we the people will feel our voices have been heard through our elected representatives.

— Special to the Press Herald