OPINION:
The Twitter account Libs of TikTok exposed one of the more interesting statements from a liberal this week. The person on the post said, “Conservatives humanize babies by putting a gender on them so they can stop people from having abortions.”
Wow, there is so much to unpack in that statement.
First, if only it was that easy. Yes, I would love it if the only thing we had to do to get people to stop having abortions was to put a gender on the unborn child. Scientific research has found many different methods of determining the sex of an unborn child.
Noninvasive prenatal testing involves a blood test that can, along with other things, be used to determine sex as it looks for pieces of the male (Y) chromosome in blood. Medical professionals perform this test around 10 weeks into a pregnancy.
A midterm ultrasound is when many pregnant women find out the sex of their baby. That is typically done between 18 and 22 weeks. A developing baby is usually large enough to see genitals, which help identify the sex of the baby. There are also other ways to determine the sex of a baby.
Sadly, sex selection has historically been used as an incentive for having an abortion in many cultures around the world. Unborn baby boys are aborted at lower rates than unborn baby girls. That is the true war on women.
As a supporter of protecting innocent life, I would love it if humanizing an unborn child was enough to get people to stop having abortions. When I was governor of Wisconsin, I signed a law that required that the people involved with killing an unborn baby through an abortion had to do an ultrasound and offer to show it to the person getting the abortion. Over the years, I had been supportive of organizations that provided free ultrasounds to women in crisis pregnancy situations. They knew that once an expectant mother saw her unborn baby, she would have second thoughts. It was the reason we championed the law.
An ultrasound, just like revealing the gender of a child, humanizes the baby because she or he is a human being. An unborn baby is not a dog or a cat. She or he is a human.
Some radicals would say that the “fetus” is not human until she or he can survive outside of the womb. But newborn babies cannot survive outside of the womb without the support of an older human being. If someone killed a newborn child, that person would be guilty of murder. Tragically, someone could kill that same human being moments before birth and it would be legal under a new law in Colorado.
Science tells us that an unborn baby is a human being. Science. You know, the thing that radicals have been harping about for the past two years (when they weren’t holding their breath at LA Rams playoff games).
If we follow the science, our minds show us that an unborn baby is a human being. But our heart tells us that too. If a pregnant woman loses her unborn baby before birth, we don’t send her a get-well card. We would send her a sympathy card. That is just basic human decency. It is a reminder that we understand that she lost her baby, not just a clump of cells or an organ.
Wanting to know the gender of a baby isn’t new. It’s why people are still holding gender reveal celebrations all over the world. And science tells us that a man is a male human. Males are the sex that have the capacity to produce motile gametes that fertilize the eggs of a female. A woman is a female human. Females are the sex that can bear young. People may identify as whatever they want, but that does not change the science.
Science should be the driving force in debates over gender and abortion. Science shows very clear definitions for what is a man and what is a woman. And science shows that an unborn baby is clearly a human — which is why we should indeed humanize her or him. All the more reason we should put an end to abortions. It’s past time to follow the science.
• Scott Walker is the president of Young America’s Foundation and served as the 45th governor of Wisconsin from 2011 to 2019.