The Bible makes it clear that life begins at fertilisation. It talks of us being ‘knit together’ in our mother’s womb (Ps 139:13-16) and the angel’s announcements to Mary and Joseph talk of conception being the start of life. Admittedly in the case of Jesus, this was a conception like no other, but it is a fact that, under normal circumstances, when the male sperm fertilises the female egg, life starts and the result of this, in time, will be the birth of a baby, a genetically unique individual.
Nowadays, through technology, we can even see the baby inside the womb. I have a photograph near the computer of my granddaughter’s 12 week scan: I constantly marvel at the clarity of this picture, even down to her large forehead and snub nose! Doctors tell us that at three weeks, the baby’s heart starts to beat and at eight weeks, all its organs are in place. As early as ten weeks, the baby has fingerprints! We know so much more now about life before birth, and it is a wonderful thing to behold.
Many in our society dispute the fact that life starts at conception, however. For them, life does not begin until the actual birth, or it occurs later on in the pregnancy when the ‘bunch of cells’ becomes a foetus. Such reasoning is dangerous, because it allows for people to think of abortion – the deliberate termination of a human pregnancy – as something ‘humane’ or ‘necessary’, rather than the deliberate taking of human life, which commonly would be termed murder.
The Christmas story reminds us that life begins way before we hold a screaming baby in our arms. The Bible takes us on this long journey from conception to birth (see Matt 1 & 2; Luke 1) to remind us, among other things, of the sanctity of life. Society is all the poorer when it forgets this.