Where Babies Come From

First Things, October 1990.

Excerpt:

Recent reports from a French laboratory contain some good news and some bad news for the prochoice movement.

The good news is that abortion is not the taking of human life. Studies conducted by the French geneticist Jacques “Mad Jack” Junot of the Institut Genetique in Paris reveal that, contrary to prevailing scientific opinion, human genetic material is not present until birth. (According to Professor Junot, the birth process triggers a genetic transformation of the fetus into a human being.) Therefore, as prochoicers have long contended, killing the fetus”which, in its early stages, looks more like a small fish than a child”is not murder.

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