To Convince a Friend to Defend Life, Begin With This One Truth
Lisa Smiley wasn’t supposed to survive the one-child policy in China. But decades after her parents hid Lisa and her siblings before fleeing to safety, she speaks with compelling clarity to our culture’s raging abortion debate.
In short: It’s a baby.
“When a woman gets pregnant, it’s a baby growing inside her—not a clump of cells, a blob of tissue or a product of conception,” says Smiley. “It’s a baby with unique DNA—bursting into life, growing and developing inside her.”
Her assertion is backed up by Dr. Maureen Condic, professor of neurobiology and pediatrics at University of Utah School of Medicine.
“The conclusion that human life begins at sperm-egg fusion is uncontested, objective, based on the universally accepted scientific method of distinguishing different cell types from each other and on ample scientific evidence—thousands of independent, peer-reviewed publications,” states Dr. Condic in a white paper published by Charlotte Lozier Institute.
Even the U.S. justice system has recognized how a life in the womb is a “whole, separate, unique, living human being”—a fact upheld by the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in a 2008 court ruling.
It’s clear from her writing that Lisa Smiley appreciates these finer points of law and science. Yet raising her young family in North Texas while producing pro-life media on the side, she takes a more conversational approach.
“I’ve been pregnant four times and given birth to four babies,” Smiley continues. “When that pregnancy test turns positive, I know it’s a baby! And when I tell other people I’m pregnant, they know too. That’s what the word pregnant means: You’re pregnant with child.”
She describes the horrific reality of abortion in stark terms. “In an abortion, it’s a baby that’s being cut up, killed and vacuumed out of the mother.”
“It’s one of those inconvenient truths abortion activists don’t like to admit,” Smiley concludes. “Because when it’s a baby in the womb, it changes everything.” {eoa}
After 10 years on staff at The Heritage Foundation and Focus on the Family, Josh M. Shepherd currently serves in communications at Bound4LIFE International—a grass-roots movement to pray for the ending of abortion and for revival worldwide. He earned a degree in Business Marketing from the University of Colorado. He and his wife Terri live in the Washington, D.C., area.
