But, of course, it’s not just the cultural legitimacy of science that anti-abortion activists and writers want to invoke. The very existence of the first argument that “we cannot know” when life begins, a la Bump, testifies to the fact that many people are not at all “fine with the idea that an abortion represents the end of a life.” Many are, in fact, uncomfortable with the idea of having a category of human life that is not granted a status of “humanity.”
When anti-abortion activists say that human life begins at conception, they are not trying to confuse people about whether legal personhood and a viable conceptus are actually the same thing. They are trying to reinforce and build on the common intuition that society’s notions about human life should have some correspondence to observable reality, and that legal personhood should have a relationship to when we know a new individual of the species comes into existence. In this respect, anti-abortion advocates see themselves as advocates of a reality-based community, and so they show little patience with arguments that we can generate our own private meanings about when life begins.
And, yes, these activists and pamphleteers do get a kick out of appealing to the authority of science over the willful denials of others.
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