Baby Arthur had parvovirus, which was causing his body to fill with fluid. “His organs were failing. His heart was completely enveloped in fluid. It was struggling to pump,” his mother said. “If nothing was done, he would not have made it much longer.”
According to doctors, there was a 50 percent chance he would not survive. Arthur would need a special type of blood transfusion, requiring a procedure that a doctor could only perform when guided by an ultrasound. The doctor did it. Arthur Ransom survived and is now 15 months old. Where was this child and how old was he when the doctor acted to save his life? He was in London, England, inside his mother’s womb. She had only been pregnant for 16 weeks.
As Arthur’s story shows, our growing understanding of fetal development has made it harder to ignore the truth: Human life begins at conception, and it’s a moral fact that medical science must do everything it can to preserve human life from that moment on. Deliberately taking the life of an innocent human being can never be justified.
When the public sees clear, accurate information about the development of unborn babies, moral clarity follows. Unfortunately, some of the most powerful pro-abortion groups, like Planned Parenthood, minimize what science has made clear by reducing these tiny humans to merely “clumps of cells.”
Since its launch in 2021, Charlotte Lozier Institute’s Voyage of Life website has chronicled the development of the unborn child by presenting established peer-reviewed science that demonstrates the child’s undeniable humanity. Since then, as scientific knowledge has expanded, the evidence has only strengthened.
Medical advancements have increased the survival chances of a baby born at 23 weeks’ gestation from 16 percent two decades ago to about 55 percent today. We know now that a grandmother’s cells can be found in the umbilical cord blood of her grandchild. We have also learned that as early as six months’ gestation, the baby is drawn to face-like patterns of light.
Despite these advancements, which build on developmental truths known for decades, pro-abortion groups like Planned Parenthood actively work to minimize the scientific reality of early human development.
For example, Voyage of Life notes that a long-established moment in early pregnancy occurs a little more than three weeks after a baby is conceived. “Only 22 days after conception or 5 weeks and 1 day gestation, the unborn baby’s heart starts beating,” it says. “Once the heart starts beating rhythmically, it does not stop until the person dies.”
What does Planned Parenthood say about this unborn child with a beating heart in its online “Month by Month” explanation of pregnancy? It does not call it a heartbeat in a human being, but “cardiac activity” in “part of the embryo.” “A part of the embryo,” says Planned Parenthood, “starts to show cardiac activity. It sounds like a heartbeat on an ultrasound, but it’s not a fully-formed heart—it’s in the earliest stage of the heart developing.”
When the unborn child reaches 13 or 14 weeks’ gestation, Planned Parenthood admits the “biological sex of the fetus can sometimes be seen by looking at external sex organs on an ultrasound.”
But, again, Planned Parenthood doesn’t refer to this boy or girl as a human or an unborn child.
Voyage of Life notes: “By week 13, the baby’s face has taken on its familiar shape.” The baby can also “stretch, rotate his head, practice breathing, and yawn.”
Even at the very end of a full-term pregnancy, Planned Parenthood will not call an unborn child a baby or a human being.
Planned Parenthood clearly avoids addressing the unborn baby’s milestone developments. Instead, it devotes more attention to the physical discomforts of pregnancy. In the eighth month, it says the mother: “may get varicose veins…or hemorrhoids... Hemorrhoids can be painful and itchy and can cause bleeding. You may also get stretch marks where your skin has expanded.” It adds, “You may urinate a bit when sneezing or laughing because of pressure from your uterus on your bladder.”
Why does Planned Parenthood do this? Because if it focused on the developing human life in the womb, it would be admitting that each of the hundreds of thousands of abortions it performs every year is the deliberate taking of a human life.
The scientific realities of human development shouldn’t be an ideological debate. That is why CLI has updated Voyage of Life—to reflect the growing body of scientific knowledge about unborn life and make it accessible to the public.
As Voyage of Life has demonstrated since its launch, scientific advancements consistently reinforce what biology has long shown about unborn human life: These tiny humans, like baby Arthur, have an undeniable right to live no matter where they are in the voyage of life.
Karen Czarnecki is the executive director of Charlotte Lozier Institute.