Scientific facts indicate that the reality of abortion ignores the dignity God created and bestowed on humans in the womb, says Dr. Kristin M. Collier, a recent pro-life convert who spent four decades as an “aggressive” pro-abortionist.
“[When it comes to babies and mothers,] we can’t think about one without the other,” Collier said in her presentation “Fearfully and Wonderfully Made: Prenatal Development Through the Stages,” which was sponsored by the Notre Dame Office of Life and Human Dignity. “It’s really impossible to do that.”
“A prenatal child was the first person to recognize Jesus as the Christ so the prenatal child has this very elevated position in the redemptive-historical narrative of the scripture,” Collier said.
Collier noted that the placenta is the only human organ shared between two people and its health has lifelong effects on both the mom and baby.
“The baby’s development is intimately connected to the mental, social, and physical health of her mother,” Collier said. “It represents a very beautiful dependency in pregnancy.”
Calling an unborn child a clump of cells sounds right because it’s often coming from people who consider themselves experts, Collier said, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. Science recognizes that human life begins at conception but Collier said many political activists choose to overlook that.
“I think it’s just another attempt using language to distance the prenatal child’s humanity from you or me as if they really aren’t the same,” Collier noted. “I would call this narrative malpractice. And it’s really just a shame when you have famous people with big platforms validating this narrative malpractice.”
Collier walks through the stages of development and shows how babies are alive, active, and influenced by their mother’s health decisions, physiology, psychology, and environment. Collier said research also suggests that some babies’ cells remain in their mothers’ bodies and can help with healing or contribute to certain physiological processes.
“I think this just represents — because God is the maker of our biology, he’s the author of all science, he’s relational in his very nature — we shouldn’t be surprised to find that we are relational in our biology even down to the level of the cell. This is just a relationality we see and we’re continuing to uncover in ways that show us we are profoundly connected and influenced by another,” Collier said.
Collier added that the effects of abortion on babies and women are clear.
While the graphic physical pain that abortion can cause to an unborn baby is an important part of the abortion conversation, “the absence or presence of pain in the prenatal child does not and should resolve the morality of abortion,” Collier said, noting that killing a person just because their pain receptors were unresponsive would still be immoral. She also added that women often struggle with mental health following getting an abortion.
Not only does science definitively indicate that killing unborn children is wrong, but Christians have an even bigger duty to protect human life, Collier emphasized.
“God made us with love and care in our mother’s womb and we have inviolable dignity and when I see pregnant patients now, I see two patients. And that really was not the case for a long period of time,” Collier said, who called the development of babies a “miracle.”
