There is a tremendous consensus in the scientific community about when life begins. This is hardly controversial. If the claim were made that life was discovered on another planet, for example, there are well-defined criteria to which we could refer to conclusively determine whether the claim was accurate. How do scientists distinguish between life and non-life?
A scientific textbook called “Basics of Biology” gives five characteristics of living things. These five criteria are found in all modern elementary scientific textbooks:
1. Living things are highly organized.
2. All living things have an ability to acquire materials and energy.
3. All living things have an ability to respond to their environment.
4. All living things have an ability to reproduce.
5. All living things have an ability to adapt.
If we trace your life back to when you first had all five of these characteristics, when would that point be? According to this elementary definition of life, your life began at fertilization, when your father’s sperm united with your mother’s oocyte (or egg). From this moment, you were highly organized, you had the ability to acquire materials and energy, you had the ability to 
respond to your environment, and you had the ability to reproduce (the cells divide, then divide again, etc., and barring pathology and pending reproductive maturity have the potential to reproduce other members of the species). Non-living things do not do these things. Even before the mother is aware that she is pregnant, a distinct, unique life has begun his or her existence inside her.
Furthermore, from that point you were unquestionably human, a member of the species homo sapiens. When humans procreate, they don’t make non-humans like slugs, monkeys, cactuses, bacteria, or any such thing. Emperically-verifiable proof is as close as your nearest abortion clinic: send a sample of an aborted fetus to a laboratory and have them test the DNA to see if it’s human or not. A new human being comes into existence from the earliest moment of fertilization.
Biologically, from the moment of conception this new human being is not a part of the mother’s body. Since when
does a mother’s body have male genitals, two brains, four kidneys? The preborn human being may be dependent upon the mother for nutrition, however, this does not diminish his or her humanity, but helps to prove it. Moreover, dependence upon a parent for survival is not a capital crime.
At the average time when a woman is aware that she is pregnant (the fifth to sixth week after conception), the preborn human being living inside her is metabolizing nutrition, excreting waste, moving, growing, and doing many other things that non-living things just do not do. As early as 21 days after conception, the baby’s heart has begunto beat his or her own unique blood-type, often different than the mother’s. (Moore & Persaud, The Developing Human, p.310; Nilsson & Hamberger, A Child is Born, p.86; Rugh & Shettles, From Conception to Birth, p.217.)
At 40 days after conception, brain waves can be read on an EEG, or an electroencephalogram. (Dr. H. Hamlin, Life or Death by EEG, JAMA, Oct.12, 1964, p.113.)
Medical science already refers to a spontaneous heart rhythm and the presence of brain waves to determine whether someone has died. If an organ donor is in an automobile accident, for example, and is on life support in a hospital, the physician cannot “pull the plug” and donate the patient’s organs to others unless the patient is “brain dead” and the heart is not beating on its own. If the medical community maintained consistency with this generally-accepted medical definition of human life, then we would condemn every abortion after the time when the average woman discovers she is pregnant. Every abortion, by the generally-accepted standards of medical science, aborts an innocent human life.
One of the most amazing photographs I have ever seen is of a surgery being performed on a 21 week-old fetus named Samuel Armas. The boy is having surgery performed in utero for his spina bifida. In the photograph, the unconscious boy’s hand is poking through the surgical incision in the uterus and is resting on the finger of the surgeon. You can see the photo at http://www.michaelclancy.com/. The picture paints a thousand words that my mere words cannot match, but allow me to draw attention to the obvious fact that the surgeon is performing surgery on one living human being who is residing in the womb of another living human being.
“Yeah,” the pro-choice attorney rebuts, “but is it a person?”
In Roe vs. Wade, Justice Harry Blackmun noted, “The appellee and certain amici argue that the fetus is a ‘person’ within the language and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. In support of this, they outline at length and in detail the well-known facts of fetal development. If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant's case, of course, collapses, for the fetus' right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the (Fourteenth) Amendment.” 
According to Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, a person is “a human being.” Attempts to render an entire class of human beings as “non-persons” based upon arbitrary qualities such as age and place of residence in order to discriminate against them is immoral and unjust. History is full of infamous examples of governments legalizing the discrimination of an entire class of human beings by rendering them “non-persons.” Jews were rendered “sub-humans” in Germany in the 1940’s and colonial slave owners bought and sold kidnapped Africans as property. As a matter of fact, the Supreme Court in 1857 ruled that Dred Scott, a black slave, was not a “person” with rights but the “property” of his master. Was the Court wrong then? Of course! The Supreme Court of 1973 that legalized abortion nationwide with its Roe v. Wade decision was just as wrong. They dehumanized an entire class of human beings in order to legitimize wholesale fatal discrimination against them. Abortion may go down in history as the greatest human rights abuse of all time.
As our nation’s founding documents make clear, the right to life is God-given and inalienable. The right to live cannot be legitimately usurped by men, whether they be parents, legislators, or judges. No man, no government has the right to deprive one of life or liberty without a trial by jury, regardless of skin color, age, stage of development, level of dependence upon others for survival, or place of residence.
Abortion causes the death of an innocent human being. It is immoral and unjust when evaluated in the light of the law of the land. The Fifth Amendment of the Bill of Rights in the Constitution says, “No person shall be… deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law (a trial by jury).” Legal abortion is in direct violation of the Constitution of the United States. It is also in direct violation of the Ohio Constitution: Article 1, Section 1 of the Ohio Constitution, says, “All men are, by nature, free and independent, and have certain inalienable rights, among which are those of enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and seeking and obtaining happiness and safety.”
Legal abortion is also in direct violation of the divine commandment that forbids taking the life of an innocent human being when it says, “Do not murder” (Exodus 20:13). The civil authorities God has set up
over Ohio have their first obligation to God – not constituents, and not to the Federal government. History is full of examples where lesser authorities were condemned for submitting unto their authorities, because, when they submitted unto those evil laws they violated God’s enduring commandments. For example, consider the Nazi guards who were condemned and hung at the Nuremburg trials for the slaughter of the Jews at the concentration camps – even though what they did was legal at the time, was mandated by their government’s superiors, and they risked injury or death if they disobeyed. Divine law trumps man-made law whenever there is a contradiction.
Ohio has no business pointing its finger at the Supreme Court, to the accomplices in Congress or in the executive branch, or to any political party or feminist movement for the Abortion Holocaust. God holds Ohio responsible for the bloodshed Ohio allows. We bear the guilt of innocent bloodshed for the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocent Ohio children who have been dismembered and butchered in our state (Numbers 35:30-34). How can this guilt of innocent bloodshed be assuaged? Ohio should defy Roe v. Wade and re-criminalize abortion statewide, and then enforce state law in defiance of judicial tyranny.
If you share my commitment to protect the unborn children in Ohio, I need your help. The foes of life and liberty are formidable, and unbelief and compromise fills the ranks of those who call themselves “pro-life”and “Republican.” I need your prayers, I need your financial assistance, I need you to volunteer to help me get elected, and I need you to vote and get your friends and family to vote. The Republican primary is on March 4 – don’t miss it!
“With God, all things are possible.” -
the Ohio state motto
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