Were you yet conceived when Louise Brown was conceived in a glass tube in a laboratory in England?
Louise Joy Brown made the news when she was conceived in a slender glass tube. That's called in vitro fertilization. In vitro means in glass, and Louise's life is the first known human life to begin in the usual way but in an unusual place, outside her mother's body.
An egg taken from one of Louise's mother's ovaries and sperm taken from her father were put together in a glass tube. One of the sperm successfully fertilized the egg there, and when that happened, new life---Louise's life---began. The moment of a new life made is called conception, which means beginning.
Two-and-a-half-days later, doctors implanted that newly conceived life into Louise's mother's uterus, or womb. There it would go through many stages until entering zillions of other stages outside the womb until yet another stage, called the birth stage.
Louise's mother's uterus accepted and held onto that new life introduced from the glass tube and her uterus and Louise's embryonic life clung, mutually, to each other. This happened invisibly, and Louise's mother did not know if the new life within her was male or female. The gender was determined at conception, but no one knew what the determination was...yet.
Louise's mother's body naturally fed and cushioned and adapted to Louise's growth, as little Louise's organs formed and grew, as she breathed, took nourishment, and did somersaults there. Like all life in utero (in the womb), Louise had her own blood, separate from her mother's. In her life's newest stages, her blood flowed to keep her heart beating. No other human, at that time, could detect her heartbeat.
Later, science caught up more, and her heartbeat could have been detected before her third week of life in the womb. Soon, if not already, it may be detected close to its earliest beating.
In the first of many "leavings" of human life, Louise's life left the glass tube. That was about 60 hours after her life began. In the usual situations, the new life's first leaving is when that new
life, conceived in the mother's ovary (when an egg and one sperm
unite), leaves the ovary and goes into a fallopian tube, through which
it travels to the womb, or uterus.
Several months later, the second "leaving" of her life would occur as it does for all life in the womb, when Louise's time came to leave her mother's womb.
All life eventually goes through that "leaving" process, leaving the inner world of the womb for the outer world, where the lungs will breathe in the air environment, no longer breathing and growing in the amniotic fluid environment of the womb.
In fact, the growth reaches a point, in usual circumstances, that the womb can no longer contain that life in a healthy way. At this point of life, all of us must travel again. We must travel through the birth passage of our mother's body and into the air, where all of us live eventually, to be entirely separate from the mother once one of our main physical links with our mothers is cut. That link is the umbilical cord, by which the mother's body helps support the new life's growth and survival, health and feeding during the developmental stages going on inside the womb.
For Louise, leaving the womb was her second "leaving." Whereas most of us have our first "leaving" from ovary to womb, Louise's second leaving was from glass tube to womb. As we know, the final "leaving" for her will be as for us, at death.
Louise's day of leaving the womb, or birth stage, was, like your birth and mine, another of many other changes and stages that begin at conception. For Louise, as for us, leaving the womb would be one of the multitudes of new stages that human life experiences after conception and after birth and before death.
Louise's birth day was July 25, in 1978, so at this writing she is almost 31 years old. That is by both western standards of measurement, which start at the birth stage, and eastern standards, which begin to measure life at the beginning, at conception.
The reason Louise had a stage of life that most of us do not have, being started in a glass tube (in vitro), is that Louise's mother's uterus had been blocked from receiving new life, although she was able to conceive new life. Louise's mother's fallopian tubes were blocked. That meant that life she conceived naturally within an ovary in her body (in vivo) could not enter or leave the fallopian tube by which life normally travels before leaving the fallopian tube to take up residence, for a while, in the womb.
Natural events send the conceived life through a fallopian tube into the womb (uterus), but in Louise's mother's case, new life could not reach the uterus through a fallopian tube, for both of her mother's tubes were blocked. Louise's life could not reach the place, the womb, uniquely capable of handling the massive growth stages of new life.
The first medical event of a new life conceived not in one of the mother's ovaries (in vivo) but in a glass tube is called in vitro (or, in glass) fertilization. Across science and ethics, the term used for the human egg's acceptance of human sperm's insertion into it, whether in vitro or normally, is called fertilization, which is also conception.
The word "conception" means "beginning." Synonyms, or words with the same meaning as "conceive," are: "begin," "commence," "start," "initiate," "inaugurate," and "usher in."
Those definitions caused me to pause and think again about the word "inaugurate." In January 2009, a new American president will be inaugurated. That's an auspicious day. It is not the beginning of a new human life, but it is the beginning of a new human role in life. Inauguration Day's swearing-in marks the beginning, or the conception, start, and ushering in of a new administration, the start of a new presidential term, the initiation of a new time, and the ushering in of a new team.
No one argues against the fact that once a president is sworn in, thereby inaugurated, that the role or status of "President" is real. To say it is not yet real or that the person is not yet the president would be ridiculous, would it not? The President, a minute after being sworn in, has not done a thing as a president. The President has not signed a bill, addressed Congress, sat in the Oval Office officially, or proved he can do a thing.
Yet, no one will say that he is not yet president at the instant of inauguration, which is the conception of that unique presidency. There is no question about it at all. There are never any editorials questioning the reality of that person, at swearing-in, being a president. There is no question about the newly-sworn President's right to beidentified as a president.
To the contrary, in the past early days and months of a presidency comments like "This presidency is in its embryo phase," or "This presidency is in its infancy." Yet, no one says it is not a presidency.
The people will not wait for a few days, months, or years after the oath of office to say, "Oh, now, five or nine months later we truly have a new president. Now he is a really a president, whereas on the first day, before he entered the Oval Office and went through the tests and decisions he's had to make, he was not."
Months and years after that beginning, the new president may look and act more presidential than he did on the day of the beginning of his new term. He may even think differently from the way he thought on Inauguration Day, that embryo phase, due to events, crises, and many unexpected dangers that no one thought would happen.
Yet, he and the people will still say that that he truly and legally was president from the beginning, from his inauguration, before he had done or said anything to prove that he was President. It seems ridiculous, doesn't it, to say, "The beginning was not the beginning; the moment he was ushered in by the swearing-in of Inauguration Day was not really the moment he became President."
We have no problem acknowledging the fact of any president's official beginning in office. We agree that at inauguration the person sworn in as the U. S. president is President. We accept that the President's term is. It is "the life of that presidency." And that person in that office will be protected, respected, and honored as the president from the first mili-second of the oath of office.
"When does life begin?" and "Does human life begin at conception?" are two questions asked of all candidates for office at one time or another.
Each one agrees that whoever is sworn in will, immediately, without any word or subsequent action, be President. Yet, many disagree and say that life does not begin at the beginning. This cannot be.
Think of your life. You were conceived, which means "you began."
That means that your life began. Your life had a beginning and that beginning can be no time other than the moment your life was conceived. Without that moment, you could not be and you could not ever have been, under any circumstances.
If you had never been conceived, you would never be. If there had never been a beginning, a conception, of you, the person with your unique DNA, there would be no you even to discuss or address any comment to. You would never have been and you would not now be. To be, your life had to begin, and there was no way for it to begin except at the conception of you, when one female egg and one male sperm united to begin the life of one unique person that was and still is you!
Oh, you've changed. You do not look at all like your earlier, elementary school photos. But you are the same person. You are the same person, and you have grown.
Human life begins at conception. Both science and reason show this, without doubt.
Further, there is the personal dimension. If doctors had tossed Louise's life, as yet unnamed, while she was bursting with growth at astronomical rates in that glass tube, if they had tossed that glass tube for any or no reason at all...would they have destroyed Louise's life?
Of course! Her life had been conceived, started, begun,ushered in, inaugurated! Do you think the parents of that new human being, later to be named Louise Joy Brown, would ever have let the world forget it if anyone had tossed away and destroyed her life, which began in that tube?
This is why many people, whose parents have told them their history from the beginning, say things like, "I was conceived on a cruise ship," "I was conceived in Paris," "I was conceived near a war zone," or "I was conceived on a Sunday afternoon." We all know that such statements refer to a "who," and an "I' that was and is human life. Special circumstances often make such true statements possible.
All of the information about Louise Joy Brown shows that without the fertilization of a female human egg by a human sperm Louise Brown would never have been. She could never have existed---by any stretch of the imagination or of the facts. Without being conceived by that human fertilization process---whether in a glass tube (in vitro) or in her mother's body (in vivo)---Louise Joy Brown would never have been.
By all of these things we see clearly that human life begins at conception.
Without apology or mistake, we can truly, reliably, correctly say: My life began when I was conceived... and in that way so did your life and everyone's life begin."
Life begins...at the beginning of life...at fertilization/conception. That is indisputable fact about Louise Joy Brown's life and also about your life. It is true about every person's life, whether male or female. That is true of every person who ever lived, who now lives, and who will ever be born---Life begins at the beginning of life.
I feel sure that Louise's parents knew what they owed to the successful fertilization in vitro, in that glass tube. We can easily suspect that knowledge influenced Joy as one of Louise's given names.
Jean Purcell is an American writer of print and internet articles and books on faith, public policy, refugees, and marriage. Her first book was Not All Roads Lead Home under her pen name, Jane Bullard. Jean is a publisher of nonfiction books-visit http://www.opinebooks.com - and is a nonfiction book consultant. Sign up for her free Opinari Quarterly for Christian Writers, Publishing Professionals, Book Lovers, and Reviewers at http://www.opinebooks.com/opinari.shtml, co-edited by Carolyn J. Hesson.
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Very well explained and presented! Takes me back to an embryology class I once loved and took! Enjoyed reading this. Marijo (Mary jo os how it is pronounced - dad was a creative speller)
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