By Leo Lau

Since our last election cycle, abortion has continued to be one of the most hotly debated and emotionally charged issues in American politics. And for good reason: unlike the economy or foreign policy, abortion is profoundly personal. According to the Pew Research Center, over two-thirds of Harris supporters and one-third of Trump supporters considered abortion to be a top voting issue, underscoring its significance.

A central argument made by pro-choice advocates is that abortion restrictions are effectively restrictions on healthcare. They assert that abortion is one of the last remaining medical procedures women are denied access to, being an affront to human rights. As the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists summarized succinctly, “abortion is an essential component of women’s healthcare”. Given that over one million abortions occur annually in the US, a nationwide ban would constitute a gross neglect of women’s health. 

However, when they call abortion healthcare, there’s an implicit assumption that the fetus is not a living human being. For if the fetus were alive and distinct from its mother, then abortion would involve the intentional ending of a human life. Under such circumstances, the labelling of abortion as healthcare becomes deeply problematic. Abortion would then be the opposite of healthcare, ending someone’s life instead of promoting their well-being.

Therefore, we must step back and ask the question: What is an abortion? Abortion is most commonly defined as the “procedure to end a pregnancy”. Yet this phrasing of “ending a pregnancy” appears to be a euphemism that softens the moral weight of the act. In reality, the procedure involves killing the living fetus, often through lethal injections and tools that break up the fetus. To refer to this outcome without acknowledging its inherent nature is to obscure the moral reality of the situation.

This lack of clarity is reflected in public perception. According to a YouGov survey, over a quarter of pro-choice Americans believe that life begins at birth. This view, however, is demonstrably false, and this prevailing false belief is used to justify abortion continually. From the same survey, only 10% of pro-choice Americans held the correct belief that life begins at conception, or when the sperm fertilizes the egg. The morality of abortion hinges on when life begins. If the prevailing view about this question is incorrect, public policy built on these misconceptions risks being gravely unjust. 

In reality, life can easily be shown to be at conception in several different ways. An overwhelming 96% of biologists affirm that human life begins at fertilization. This is not a philosophical opinion, but rather a confirmed scientific fact. Going even further, biologists use several characteristics of life to determine whether something is considered to be such. These characteristics are how we can identify if life exists in space. From the moment of conception, the zygote exhibits all the characteristics of biological life, including but not limited to growth, metabolism, homeostasis, and response to the environment. Furthermore, we know that the fetus is human, as it contains unique human DNA. Thus, we can affirm that at conception, an independent human life is formed.

This delivers a devastating blow to the claim that abortion is a form of healthcare. What other types of healthcare end the life of a human being prematurely? Certainly not treatments we associate with healthcare. The death penalty, for instance, could hardly be considered healthcare, and neither should abortion, if it indeed involves the deliberate taking of a human life.

In sum, the question of whether abortion is healthcare is answered only when examining the biological status of the fetus. If the fetus is alive and human at the moment of conception, as biology and reason suggest, then abortion should never be considered abortion. Rather, it becomes a medical procedure that has serious moral issues.

This Op-ed reflects the views and opinions of the writer, not Westwood Review as a whole.