MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry Says Life Begins When Parents Decide It Does

MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry thinks she has the answer to the ages old question of just when life begins. Her answer: life begins whenever parents “decide” it does.

Practically since the beginning of the national abortion debate the most fought over question between the pro-abortion and pro-life sides is just when does life begin? In an attempt to avoid the arbitrary, most try to utilize some sort of scientific reasoning to decide when life is life. The pro-life side says life begins as soon as the egg is fertilized while the pro-abortion side often contends that life isn’t life until it is self-sustaining, meaning a fetus isn’t “life” until it can survive outside the womb.

But here comes extreme left-winger Harris-Perry to offer the most arbitrary criteria of all: whenever anyone feels like life begins, then that is “life.”

“When does life begin? I submit the answer depends an awful lot on the feeling of the parents. A powerful feeling–but not science,” Harris-Perry said on her July 21 MSNBC show. 

The implications of this sort of provisional criteria of when someone is deemed worthy of “life” are far reaching, indeed.

As Catholic Priest, Father John Zuhlsdorf points out, if the criteria for when life is actually “life” are built on such an arbitrary and transitory thing as the “feelings” of someone else, then anyone at any time can be deemed unworthy of life.

Zuhlsdorf warns of the obvious conclusion that if someone in a position of power over someone else, “parents” or no, decide a life is not “worth what it once was,” well the ramifications are frightening, indeed.

Medical ethicist Leon Kass has also warned of the drive to devalue human life. Ubiquitous abortion, Kass says, so devalues human life that it “means we no longer see a child as a gift but as a product of our will to be had by choice only.” That concept, Kass laments, “makes human choice the basis of all value” instead of a reverence for life serving that purpose.

Kass also says, “abortion is connected to lots of other things that are threats to human dignity in its fullness.”

But Harris-Perry isn’t alone on the left. Left-wing activists such as Princeton’s Peter Singer have for years maintained that born babies are not “self-aware, or capable of grasping that they exist,” so there is no reason babies cannot be killed even after birth.

Father Zuhlsdorf and Leon Kass warn, though, that if ideas like those of Harris-Perry or Peter Singer prevail then there is no stopping “abortion” even for those already born.