What Wins Elections? Biology vs Religion
When dust rises during some dry windstorm, it subsides until the next blowup. With certain issues, though, a storm never seems to abate and the dust never settles. This is the case with two issues that were raised in a recent debate forum between Jenny Thacker (Democrat) and William Ridenour (Republican), our two candidates for WV Delegate for District 100.
The debate was sponsored by the Republican adjunct group We The People of Jefferson County. It took place on August 10 at the Clarion Hotel in Harpers Ferry. About 40 people attended in the audience, a fairly even mix of Democrats and Republican sympathizers, both groups vocal in their enthusiasm for their particular favorite, but mostly mute for their favorite’s opponent.
Neal Barkus has already written a solid review of the debate dynamics and I won’t repeat those details here.
I would, though, like to take this occasion to address particulars of how the field of biology came into play during the back and forth. Both candidates made reference to biology in support of their positions regarding the perennially hot topics of trans people’s rights in society and abortion.
Ridenour and his supporters were loudly dismissive of people claiming these rights, while Thacker and her supporters were just as loudly assertive of those rights.
Both opponents raised biology as evidence for their stances on these issues, and both were adamant that the other side was mistaken. Questions from the audience actually provided more points of evidence in defense of one or the other positions than did either of the candidates.
Let’s look at the abortion question first.
It was an audience member who posed the question as to whether what he called “abortion drugs,” presumably meaning mifepristone and misoprostol, should be legislatively banned in West Virginia. These are drugs administered during the first weeks of a pregnancy to terminate it, Ridenour responded “yes,” Thacker “no.”
Thacker’s response aligns with a position that the early stages of a pregnancy, up until approximately two months, represent an embryonic stage of development in which the developing organism is not viable outside the uterus. At 8 weeks the embryo weighs less than a single gram. Even when the embryo transitions into a fetus, a period when growth is very rapid, the embryo remains unviable until about 20 weeks.
One of the other audience members made the case that a pregnancy is not without dangers and that somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of early pregnancies end in miscarriages, often with health implications for the woman. This is a reason why obstetrics care is so important to making a safe and successful delivery–at 36 weeks, when the fetus formally becomes a child. But the health of the pregnant female is arguably a more important concern than the developmental progress of the embryo. She is already a daughter and granddaughter and can, as well, be a wife, a niece, a cousin, an aunt, a friend,, and even already a mother. Her life is already highly consequential, more so than the embryo, whose value is still potential. Abortion in an important way is a decision about priorities.
Terminology is important here. The field of embryology uses different terms for the life that’s developing in a uterus: zygote, blastula, morula, embryo, fetus, and finally child. Collapsing all those terms into just “child,” starting from the point of conception, is glossing over the realities of human development and attributing more “personhood” to the fetus than is warranted biologically. It’s a simplification of the terminology that has more to do with religious belief than it does with biology. And this is the reasoning Ridenour relies on to validate his position.
Arguing biology over religion won’t make a dent with someone who doesn’t want to give up their religious belief. The science based argument will lose out to the religious belief. So the opposing truths, science versus religion, reach an impasse. The practices that are impacted by the competing beliefs, abortion in this case, are allowed or not allowed by custom, social convention, and the law.
For 50 years abortion was legal across the United States, until the Supreme Court waffled on the legality question and left it up to the individual states to set their own laws. Some outlawed it; some legalized it, the larger point here being that the court did not make a moral judgment about abortion. That would seem to argue that abortion should be left to the discretion of the person who has the most to gain or lose through a pregnancy, that being the pregnant woman. If Republicans believe, as they do, that parents know best for their children in deciding matters of schooling and vaccinations and socializing, they need to extend that right to pregnancy.
An unwanted pregnancy going to term has a stronger likelihood of producing a child who will be abandoned, neglected, or abused and can suffer permanent emotional, cognitive, and physical damage. It happened on a massive scale during the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania where abortion was criminalized. More than 100,000 children were institutionalized and grew up unloved, unwanted, and severely damaged. Abortion shouldn’t be done routinely, but the right to abortion should not be denied.
And speaking of denying, what about the reality of trans people, those whose gender identification doesn’t match up with their biology. Here again embryology appears to be involved, though not in a clearcut way.
Classical embryology deals with anatomical development including the development of male and female sex organs. The facts are well known. But what’s still in the early stages of investigation are the effects of uterine hormones in shaping how the eventual child perceives the anatomical reality of the sexual organs they’re born with. There are genetic differences in the hormonal chromosomes of transexual females (those born with male sexual anatomy who nevertheless identify as females). These differences align in imaging studies with the patterns that so-called cis females (female anatomy and identifying as female) show. If these changes happen in uterine development, then trans females are as biologically real, and as “God given,” as cis females. They’re just not as statistically represented in the population. Likely the same genetic processes apply for trans males.
The net result of taking a close look at the biological realities shows not a neat this and that distinction. Biology is the last of the hard sciences to reveal all its secrets and politicians who rely on support from biology for their political viewpoints have to be guarded. In the interim, while we await clearer answers, it’s best to take a step back and be more tolerant of the diversity that mother nature herself puts in our path.
