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PERSONAL OPINION
A future abortion debate

John H. Redekop

Debate Topic: Resolved that a fetus becomes a human being only at birth

Date: January 28, 2019

Location: Menno Simons Auditorium, Columbia Bible College, Abbotsford, British Columbia

Moderator: President John Neufeld, Columbia Bible College

Debaters: Affirmative: Marilyn Wilson, Executive Director of the Canadian Abortion Rights Action League; Negative: Samuel Armas

Wilson (Affirmative):

Ladies and gentlemen, the question before us is not very complicated. Mr. Armas will doubtless tell you his story. I know it well and have followed it for as long as he has lived. Early on, I responded to this story in an interview which was published on January 8, 2000 in one of your major papers, the National Post. I still hold firmly to those views. The fetus may resemble a person, but it is not a person. The quality of being human is acquired only when a person is born.

I would also like to draw your attention to the views of Dr. Mark Bliton. In 1999, he was head of the ethics committee on fetal surgery at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where the surgery on Mrs. Armas was carried out. Take careful note of his wise words. I might add that you can check them in the same National Post article to which I have already referred. I quote Dr. Bliton: “It certainly is true that with the advent of fetal surgery, life before birth takes on an emphatically different moral complexity” and “Life in its morally relevant sense surely begins when the fetus becomes a patient.” Yet, Dr. Bliton was clear that while a fetus may have life before birth, it is not yet human life. Note carefully Dr. Bliton’s summation. Using the image of Samuel holding Dr. Brunner’s hand to promote the pro-life argument is misleading, he says. “It’s confusing things. It’s taking something compelling out of context. It rubs up on the abortion debate, but it doesn’t mean anything.”

In 1999 I concurred with this expert’s views. I still do today. They are correct views.

Armas (Negative):

I stand before you today as living evidence of the falsity of the resolution before us. Some of you know my story. My parents are Julie and Alex Armas. They live in Douglasville, Georgia. I was born on December 2, 1999. My birth was significant, and I am here today because of what happened to me before I was born.

When I was only a 20-week-old fetus, I was diagnosed as having spina bifida, which is the failure of the backbone and spinal canal to close. My mother was urged to have an abortion, an option chosen by about 90% of the parents who are given such news. I would have become merely another abortion casualty. As you know, in Canada there have been more than 3,000,000 abortions since your Supreme Court struck down your national abortion law on January 28, 1988, 31 years ago today.

After much prayer and extensive medical consultation, my parents decided to try the risky corrective surgery which had recently been pioneered. On August 19, 1999 the surgeons, led by Dr. Joseph Brunner, opened my mother’s womb and carried out the surgery on me. Afterward, I remained in my mother’s womb until birth, since the fetus at that stage cannot yet survive outside the womb. I am grateful to God that my parents are here with me today. Mom, Julie Armas, would you please stand? Thank you.

Fortuitously (or, more accurately, providentially), a USA Today photographer snapped a picture just as my hand slipped out of the womb and, with some encouragement from Dr. Brunner, put its little fingers around the comparatively huge finger of the chief surgeon. As the older folk among you will recall, that picture was flashed around the world. It is still available on the Web site of the National Right to Life Committee. It was also featured in that organization’s newsletter, which at that time already reached 400,000 subscribers. I will now flash that picture onto the large screen for you. The very modern electronics in this magnificent auditorium allow me to show it in three dimensions.

The surgery scar is still visible on my back. Here is the picture which shows my scar as it appears today. I was a person at 21 weeks, I was a person just before birth, I was a person just after birth, and I am a person, the same person, standing before you today. The tiny fingers which were curled around Dr. Brunner’s large finger are the same fingers which hold these pages which I now wave before you. The hand which briefly came out of the womb at 21 weeks is the same hand that has many times been folded in prayers of gratitude for my life, which my godly parents saw fit to spare. If these fingers and this hand were not human at 21 weeks, then what were they? I rest my case.

Wilson (Affirmative Rebuttal):

Ladies and gentlemen, you have tonight been subjected to the same kind of emotionalism and manipulation which is characteristic of spokespersons for the so-called pro-life movement. Don’t let such melodramatic sensationalism distort the issue. I repeat today what I said at the time of the very dangerous procedure carried out by Dr. Brunner: “Anti-choice groups are always trying to get the fetus established as a person.” Fortunately, your legislators are more enlightened than is Mr. Armas. Under both Canadian and US law, abortion hinges on the mother’s rights. As I put it then, “It is the choice of the woman whether to have the child.” In both Canada and the US, the fetus, even if viable, is not a legal person and thus not a human being until birth.

The law is on my side. Mothers must have choice. I also am pro-life but not at the expense of free choice. Thank you very much.

Armas (Negative Rebuttal):

Let me make two points. First, my distinguished opponent said that “It is the choice of the woman whether to have the child.” By referring to the fetus as a child, she has yielded the point and lost the argument. The Canadian Oxford Dictionary defines child as “a young human being below the age of puberty” and “an unborn or newborn human being”. If the fetus is a child, and it most surely is, then it is also human since a child is a small human being.

Second, my distinguished opponent has insisted that I was not human until I was born, but she has not cited any evidence to demonstrate that anything happened at birth to change me in some fundamental way. She cannot cite such evidence because there is none. I was as much a human being 10 minutes or 10 days before birth as 10 minutes or 10 days after birth. My humanity was and is continuous. The truth is obvious even though some people refuse to acknowledge it.

John H. Redekop is on the faculty of Trinity Western University and is a member of Bakerview MB Church in Abbotsford, B.C.

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