If you're not E.T. read this

When I was about to finish high school, one of the courses I wanted to take up at college was Law.  Being young, I wanted to be many things—doctor, nurse, painter, ballet dancer, writer, and lawyer.  To all of those I felt I wanted to become, my father had objections, but the strongest was against Law.  He would say, “Yang mga abugado, magaling magsinungaling ang mga iyan!  Ang puti, ginagawang pula, at ang pula, ginagawang puti!”  (Lawyers are good at telling lies. They make red, white, and white, red!)  Naïve as I was, I didn’t get what he meant, nor did I bother to understand what it implied.  I was barely 15 then.

Now, 50 years later, the controversy over when human life begins reminds me of my father’s words about lawyers then.  I beg your pardon, but for the life of me, I cannot understand why supposedly learned men now deny that human life begins at fertilization.  Congressmen and senators are supposedly learned, right?  So why would a number of them—now that the controversy over the RH Bill is seething hot—prolong the controversy by clinging to this silly argument that human life begins only when the fertilized egg latches on to the uterine wall?  Doesn’t our Constitution say that the life of the unborn begins at the moment of conception—that is, when the sperm and the ova meet and produce a new entity?  I cannot believe that lawmakers are ignorant of the Constitution.  Having done some sleuthing into this issue I’m more inclined to suspect there is another reason they espouse a strange point of view.    

Even a grade schooler who’s been through biology class knows the truth about the beginning of human life, so how could sophisticated adults be blind to such glaring truth?  Just for the record, I engaged Autumn , my 10-year old grandniece, a Grade 5 pupil (here shown sucking on a lollipop), in a casual chat to find out what she thinks of this issue.  Her verdict: human life begins at fertilization. 

How could she be so sure it’s human?  “Because it is humans that produced the embryo.”  And how could she say the embryo has life?  “Because if it’s dead it will stop growing.”   Bravo!  She readily agreed that if “that thing” were dead, it cannot move anymore, much less travel to attach itself to the uterine wall.  Smart girl.  Over a “high five”, we declared the embryo is human and not canine or feline, hindi bulate, butete o palaka or anything else, and it definitely possesses life because it is growing.  Ergo, human life begins at fertilization.

See how simple it is?  The truth, unadorned and undistorted by human manipulation, seen without the help of a microscope.  Or of people who make red, white, and white, red.  And that’s the truth.