When Does a Human “Person” Begin?

By Wayne Jackson

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When does human “personhood” begin? Various answers are offered to this question, depending
upon the individual responding, and his or her philosophical, or religious persuasion. The
question cannot be answered from a strictly “scientific” perspective, for science cannot
determine anything about a human “spirit,” much less when its bestowal initiates a “person.”

Some Theories
Some contend that the entity resulting from conception is not a “human person” until sometime
after birth, when it can be certified genetically sound. Such was the position of Nobel Prize
winner Sir Francis Crick, a skeptic who denied that human beings even have a soul (Howard and
Rifkin, 81).

A view among some is that the fetus becomes “human” at birth. Those who endorse the practice
of “partial-birth abortion” have no qualms about killing a child so long as a portion of the tiny
body is yet within the birth canal.

Many secular medical authorities argue that viability is the commencement of a “human
person.” Viability is generally defined as the shortest length of pregnancy after which a child that
is born prematurely has a chance of survival. Generally, this ranges from 20-27 weeks.

Conservative scholars within the framework of “Christendom” contend that personhood

commences at conception. In April of 1981, a distinguished panel of geneticists and physicians
testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee with reference to the nature of the human
organism that is produced by the union of a sperm and ovum.

Dr. McCarthy de Mere, a medical doctor and law professor at the University of Tennessee,
testified as follows: “The exact moment of the beginning of personhood and of the human body
is at the moment of conception” (emp. WJ).

Known as the “Father of Modern Genetics,” Dr. Jerome Lejeune told the lawmakers: “To accept
the fact that after fertilization has taken place a new human has come into being is no longer a
matter of taste or opinion … it is plain experimental evidence” (emp. WJ). See: When Does
Human Life Begin?.

Note the testimony of world-renowned geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, an atheist: “A human

being begins his existence when a spermatozoon fertilizes an egg cell” (10; emp. WJ). Even the
late Isaac Asimov, a rabid enemy of the Bible, conceded that “the human being … begins life
as a fertilized ovum” (20; emp. WJ). Neither of these men believed in the existence of a “soul”;
nonetheless, they acknowledged that the union of sperm and egg is the commencement of a
human person.