On Friday, ABC News correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton, a previous Planned Parenthood media award recipient, argued with “The View” co-host Sunny Hostin over the humanity of children lost to miscarriage.
Hostin, who has called herself “personally pro-life,” has suffered multiple miscarriages and told Ashton that she — and other women who have had miscarriages — have tragically lost their babies. In addition, Hostin has undergone IVF and knows that her embryos are her children. However, Ashton, insensitively argued that a miscarried child is “definitely not a baby.”
Dehumanizing humans under the guise of “science”
Ashton and the co-hosts were discussing the recent ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court stating that human embryos created during IVF can be counted as children under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. This ruling sided with parents whose embryos were dropped and killed at an IVF clinic in the state — but Ashton disagreed with it.
Ashton condescendingly told Hostin, “If you look at science, however, science and medicine, what is transferred during that IVF procedure is called a blastocyst. That’s a big word for a ball of about 200 cells.” She continued, “When it is transferred into the uterus, there is no guarantee that those cells will continue to divide. There is no guarantee that that cell ball will attach to the wall of the uterus. There is no guarantee that it will implant, and there is no guarantee that a heartbeat will develop.”
It should be noted, however, that a human is a human regardless of any guarantee how long that human being might live.
Hoston pushed back, “But the other thing is, let’s say you have a miscarriage at two months. Have you miscarried just a bunch of cells or a baby?”
Ashton continued to deny the humanity of the youngest human beings, saying, “It’s definitely not a baby. That’s an incorrect term and it’s also not a fetus.” What Ashton didn’t say, however, is that at two months, the preborn human being is in its embryonic stage, making it a human embryo. At 6 weeks past fertilization (8 weeks LMP/gestation), that preborn human looks like this:
Embryo 6 week post-fertilization
If Ashton wants to use only scientific terminology, then a newborn should not be called a baby, either, but a neonate. And the terminology changes could go on — a hand is not a hand but a manus and an ear is not an ear but an auris. Words are labels, and how they are used matters. It appears that Ashton is attempting to dehumanize preborn humans by using less familiar language to describe them.
At fertilization, a human’s unique DNA comes into being when the gametes fuse. This DNA includes information such as sex, eye color, hair color, and other physical details about who that human being is and will become. From that moment on, each human will continue to grow and further develop until death. Whether death occurs unnaturally or occurs naturally due to miscarriage or disease or injury, no matter at what age that death occurs, the life of a new human being began its journey at fertilization.
Rapid development
According to the Endowment for Human Development, by three weeks and one day, that human’s heart has begun to beat even though it has not yet developed all four chambers, and by four weeks the heart rate reaches 113 beats per minute. At four weeks and four days, the cerebral hemispheres appear in the already existing brain, and rapid brain growth begins.
Eight weeks after fertilization, when Ashton argues the preborn human is “definitely not a baby,” the developing human being responds to touch, makes hand-to-face contact (meaning the human being has hands and a face), opens and closes her mouth, squints, has joints similar to an adult’s, has a hindbrain with a “striking resemblance to that of a newborn,” and begins to favor her right or left hand. Her cranial nerves begin to resemble those of adults. More than 4,000 permanent body parts have formed and the embryonic period has ended. At week nine, she will enter the fetal stage of her life.
Here is the human being which Ashton says is “definitely not a baby”:
If they’re humans, then it’s wrong to kill them
Ashton fought to deny the humanity of preborn babies even to a woman who was clearly heartbroken over the deaths of her babies before they were born. But her lack of compassion and her efforts to use scientific terminology to undermine the preborn child’s humanity are unsurprising since she’s essentially a media activist doing Planned Parenthood’s bidding. If human embryos, fetuses, and blastocysts are indeed babies as Hostin said, then it’s wrong to kill them as Planned Parenthood does. But, in 2014, Ashton took home a Maggie award from Planned Parenthood for ‘media excellence.’
Hostin has previously said, “I don’t believe in abortion, at any time. I don’t believe in any exception to it,” and this is not the first time she has fought to defend human embryos. Last month, her co-host Sara Haines claimed that an embryo “has no organs, it is not a life yet, it is not viable until it is 24 weeks.” (In reality, the heart begins to beat at just 21 days post-fertilization and babies born as young as 21 weeks have survived. Viability is entirely arbitrary.)
Hostin responded to Haines, “You may not think that. There are at least 50 percent of Americans who believe that a human embryo is a baby. I’m one of those.”
