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Earlier this month Ohio voters rejected Issue 1—a measure that would have made it more difficult for abortion advocates to pass their proposed abortion-rights amendment to Ohio's constitution. Voters, many of them Republican, defeated it by a margin of 57 percent to 43 percent.
There is a pattern here, and it's a worrying one for the pro-life movement. Since Roe v. Wade was overturned, abortion advocates have won a string of local victories. And, interestingly, the results don't divide along party lines. It's perfectly clear that the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization has not magically lifted Roe's toxic veil of dehumanization and shifted public opinion in favor of the unborn child. If anything, the opposite seems to be happening.
Pro-life activists are quite correct to sound the alarm. They are calling for new political strategies in Ohio and across the country—but they seem reluctant to address the crux of the matter: widespread scientific ignorance.
Ohio may be "another GOP abortion warning" but to pro-life leaders, it should also be a stark reminder that ignorance and science denial about human development persists as the paramount obstacle to the establishment of a pro-life paradigm. This is especially true today, as the fate of unborn children has been left to the whims of voters rather than to the "equal protection of the laws" for "any person" guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment.
Most Americans do not know a new, individual, and living member of the human species begins to exist at fertilization. And younger Americans are the least informed. Consider this horrifying statistic: nearly one in four 18-22-year-olds think that a human life starts at birth. It does not matter how carefully pro-lifers fine-tune their election rhetoric. Until their strategy addresses this appalling knowledge gap in a serious way, pro-life public sentiment will continue to wane.
Since 1942, the biological science of human embryology—the branch of science that specializes in when a human life starts and his or her early development—has codified human reproduction in the Carnegie Stages of Human Embryonic Development. The Carnegie Stages are the global authority of human embryological research; human embryologists view the Carnegie Stages similarly to how chemists view the Periodic Table—it's the gold standard. Carnegie Stage 1 documents human sexual reproduction (i.e., fertilization) and marks the beginning of a new, whole, individual, and living human life.
Thus, a human embryo or a human fetus is an actual human being. It is not a "potential" human being. There is no such thing. And birth is a developmental milestone, among many, along the continuum of an already existing human being's life.
We can't expect people to grasp something that they are not taught. America's K-12 science guidelines, the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), exclude fundamental, scientifically accurate facts of human reproduction and human development from the curriculum. States aren't obliged to follow these guidelines, but most states base their standards on the NGSS, and 20 of them, plus the District of Columbia, have opted to do so. Remarkably, as of 2018 Virginia actually omitted human biology from its Science Standards of Learning.
When a human being begins to exist is an essential and relevant scientific fact that everyone can and should know. Moreover, the journey from a single-cell human embryo to a 100 trillion-cell human adult is one of the most profoundly significant lessons in nature. Excluding the Carnegie Stages and other basics of human embryology from biology and life science materials is like leaving out the Periodic Table from chemistry classes.
It gets worse. The NGSS set forth the false idea that organisms including human beings begin to exist at birth. In a lesson that explores the life cycles of most organisms, for example, Ohio's Learning Standards for Science (which stem from the same foundational materials as the NGSS) teach third graders that plants and animals have "life cycles that start with birth," without any type of clarifying statement about how the human life cycle—our life cycle—begins prior to birth, at fertilization, and continues during the human embryonic period, the fetal period, and then after birth, throughout the subsequent stages of human development.
Science education in schools is the most effective way to shape future generations. If pro-life leaders want to win the battle against abortion, they need to recognize and release the untapped potential of K-12 science education standards, by ensuring human embryology is in America's science classrooms. If they fail to do so, the abortion industry will continue its winning streak at the ballot box for many generations to come.
Brooke Stanton is the co-author of The First 56 Days of You: How Your Human Journey Begins, and the CEO of Contend Projects, a registered 501(c)(3) education organization spreading the basic, accurate scientific facts about when a human life starts and the biological science of human embryology.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
