I admit that I positively cringed at some of the weak argumentation, but I think that she might have the start of a good argument for pro-life from science if she would develop it a bit more.

A few points need to be articulated much better so that this argument appeals to people who don’t share a Christian worldview. The chief one is the whole part of how the baby resides in the mother, but isn’t a part of the mother. I agree that is a good argument, but her logic fails. Paraphrased, she states:

The baby has a 50% chance of being male, and thus has a penis; the mother is a woman who doesn’t have a penis. Therefore, the baby isn’t the mother, but resides in the mother.

That needs to be totally re-worked. Because there’s a 50% chance that the baby could be a female, and therefore, employing this same logic, would be part of the mother.

Perhaps a better way to state this is to define what comprises a human being. If we can find a way to agree that a single cell, capable of acting out all of the major processes of life, meets the definition of life and would be easily distinguished from non-life, then she has a good argument.

I also think she did all right in stating that when we watch a zygote develop to a embryo, then develop to a fetus, that what we see is a human being appearing exactly as a human in that stage of life would look. Similar to how a baby doesn’t look like a teenager, nor does a teenager look like a senior citizen. The fertilized egg is a human being, though it may not look fully-formed.

She touches on the “number of cells” argument as well. I’m skinny. Does that make me less of a human being than an obese person? The obese person has more cells. If someone killed me because of something I posted on my blog, should they spend less time in prison than a person who killed an obese Christian apologist because of something on the obese dude’s blog?

Of course not. You’d be laughed at if you were the attorney forwarding that argument.

Yet, for some unknown reason, many people accept and widely circulate the argument that abortion is only killing a clump of a few hundred cells. That’s not enough cells to constitute a human being, say the proponents of this argument, therefore you’re not killing a human when you perform or undergo an abortion.

Again, you’d be laughed at in court for trying to say an obese person was more “human” for having more cells than a skinny person, and therefore the killer of an obese person should spend longer in prison than the killer of a skinny person. That’s ludicrous.