When does life begin?

In a recent forum on faith in Pennsylvania, both Democratic candidates were asked whether they thought life begins at conception, and both accepted an erroneous assumption that has skewed and inflamed the national debate over abortion ever since the issue became prominent. Life is a continuum; it does not begin at conception but began at the beginning. If we all understood that, we might be able to begin finding a way to successfully address the divisiveness of abortion and abortion rights issues in our culture.

Okay, what do I mean? Biology 101. All organisms which reproduce sexually alternate between haploid and diploid generations. A haploid cell or organism has but one set of chromosomes; a diploid has two. With humans, the people we see walking around are the diploid generation; the vast majority of our cells are diploid while our sperm and eggs are our haploid generation. In sexual reproduction, two haploid individuals join to form one diploid individual ... which, upon maturity, spends much of its time trying to find another diploid individual with which to share the haploid individuals it is producing and thereby form diploid zygotes which grow up to be mature diploid individuals, and so on. In some species, such as all mammals, the diploid generation is the one we notice the most. In others, the haploid is the more obvious.

But in one important sense, it doesn't matter which generation attracts our notice, for they're both part of an unending continuum which stretches back to the origins of life and this is true whether you are a firm believer in the validity of creationist doctrine or of evolutionary theory. Individual lives may end, but in every case their beginnings stretch in an unbroken chain back across countless generations to the origin of life, and forward through their progeny to the end of time (at least, as earthly life experiences it).

Conception thus represents nothing more (nor less) than a recombination of genetic material occurring when two haploid individuals join to form a single diploid individual. It is no more a beginning of life than when a diploid individual creates haploid individuals (a process which happens without our conscious knowledge), but is just an alternation of forms occurring repeatedly in an unending continuum.

Life does not begin at conception.

And that has profound implications for the social and political debate over abortion and abortion rights, as the question shifts away from when life "begins" to a determination of when we should recognize a new diploid generation of our species as an individual with "inalienable rights." And that question is one of interpretation, over which people of good will and sincere beliefs may honestly disagree.

But more on that in another posting.

Note: this was originally posted on ketches, yaks & hawks 17 April 2008