When Does Human Life Begin?

Discussions of the complex problem of abortion are, as a rule, resolved in accordance with the way in which the question “when does life begin?” is answered. This question, however, is directly relevant to the issue only if one assumes that the life of the embryo is a human life.

But, if one understands that the beginning of a life during pregnancy may be equated with a human life only if one defines humanity, or what it means to be human, in strictly biological terms, it becomes obvious that, if being human means something in addition to, something more than or different from, being a member of a certain biological species, the answer to the question of when life begins places the problem of abortion on the level with that of animal slaughter.

This is on a far lower level of moral ambiguity (justified or not) than the crime of murder to which abortion is usually likened. In meat-eating societies, even the most advanced ones, the killing of animals remains generally palatable to the majority, quite unlike the intentional killing of human beings. Therefore abortion is unpalatable for a large portion of the American population and morally troubling even for many of those considering themselves pro-choice.

Culture distinguishes humanity from other life

Outside of the abortion debate, most people would find that defining what it means to be human as simply as the belonging to the animal species called “homo sapiens"—the genetic difference of which from the related primate species of chimpanzees is half that between wolves and dogs, for instance—leaves too many questions unanswered.

Even if one rejects the Biblical Creation story, which views humanity as the crown of Creation, radically separate from the animal kingdom, it is clear that we, humans, are qualitatively (that is in kind), rather than just quantitatively (i.e., just in degree) different from our close genetic relatives among the primates. We are more than advanced and hairless gorillas, in other words.

In fact, something distinguishes humanity from all other animal species and forms of biological life. This something, which indeed makes humanity a reality of its own kind (the defining dimension of which is not biological) is the fact that, while all other animal species transmit their ways of life genetically (aided to a greater or lesser extent by direct learning), humans alone transmit them symbolically and through indirect (i.e., again, symbolic) learning. It is this symbolic process of transmission of human ways of life which is designated by the word “culture.”

In this sense, no other animal species, however intelligent and reliant on direct learning, can be said to have culture. And it is, clearly, culture, not the capacity for or prevalence of direct learning, which explains the endless variation of human societies as compared to near-similarity of social orders within even the most advanced and social other species.

The mind enables adjustment to the cultural environment

The centrality of symbolic transmission and indirect learning makes the environment of every human life very different from the biological environment to which other organisms must adjust. We, humans, must in the first place adjust to a symbolic, or cultural environment. The process of such adjustment of a biological, animal organism to a cultural environment creates and constitutes the mind.

In the womb, the embryo confronts only the biological environment and does not have to adjust to the cultural environment; therefore, throughout the process of gestation or pregnancy, even after it develops the nervous system and the brain, it remains a biological, animal, organism.

Moreover, the adjustment to the cultural environment cannot occur immediately upon birth, but takes time; therefore, the child of human parents remains an animal for its first 10-36 months. It transforms into a human being only with the development of the mind, reflected in the acquisition of language (or other symbolic systems).

The life of an animal organism, obviously, begins at conception. But human life begins only at the moment that the animal has a mind. In some very fast developers, this can happen before the age of one year; in a large majority of cases, this happens between two and three years of age.

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Does the understanding that human life begins much later than previously thought give an adult the right to terminate the life which has begun at conception but is not yet human? Does it, in other words, resolve the question of the morality of abortion?

Hardly. It does, however, place it in a different, wider context—that of willful and inhumane destruction of any sentient life, and, removing the arbitrage from the jurisdiction of biology, makes it a problem of a purely moral choice.