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Pro life advocates claim that conception is the beginning of human life, making it the point at which human’s become morally relevant. Birth is just some event that happens later and has no bearing on things like rights. Thus, blastocysts deserve full legal protection that adult humans get and the death of a zygote ought to be weighed equally as the death of people outside the womb. It’s been repeatedly pointed out why this is either incorrect or irrelevant but this has failed to sway most pro lifers. So today I shall explore the implications of pro life reasoning were it actually sound.

What happens if we up the accuracy a bit and apply pro life reasoning? And by ‘up the accuracy’ I mean that we look at the actual beginning of a human’s life cycle. Pro lifers claim that its conception. But any high school biology student could tell you that there is a lot that has to happen before that. An egg has to be released by the female, which must then float down a long tube.  During the brief period when this is happening, a sperm cell must travel from the male, through the birth canal, and meet up with the ovum. Only then can conception begin to take place. Thus, human life has an earlier chapter that pro lifers currently ignore.

Now you could point out that each of the gametes only have half the required chromosomes that ‘actual’ people have, but the response is the same as when its pointed out that blastocysts have no brain. According to Pro lifers  such things are purely developmental issues, that have no bearing on person-hood. Physiology is nothing to base moral worth on, after all.

In fact any argument you could possibly come up with to say that the gamete is NOT a person, but a zygote is, there is a synonymous argument saying that the zygote is not a person, but a birthed human is. And since, for the purposes of this thought experiment, I’m granting the pro life position that the latter wouldn’t work, then I must also grant that the former wouldn’t work either.

Gametes fulfill the pro life criterion for human life and therefore moral worth. They are 100% human cells and their sole purpose is to develop into a separate human being, they are merely people one step back from zygotes. Conception is just some event that happens later and has no bearing on things like rights.

Can we go a step further? Well, I suppose we could look at oogonia in females and  spermatagonia in males (the gametogonium that develop into their respective gametes) , but my grasp of biology starts getting hazy about that point, and so gametes are as far back as I can go right now. No matter, it is sufficient to reveal the absurdity of pro-life arguments.

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