As we head for the silly season, I thought you might like this story. Written by Deirdre Moloney and first appearing in Right To Life News of January 1982, I’ve seen its basic idea repeated in several other articles over the years, but Deirdre did it best.

Ask most anti-choice campaigners when human life begins and they will unhesitatingly reply, ‘At conception!’ But not all of them. Over to Deirdre:

There has been much speculation as to when life begins, but as far as I know, no one has publicly used the argument of preconceptual consciousness, that is, of the awareness of personhood on the part of the sperm, even before it meets the ovum.

Time out for a moment. Deirdre is trying to tell us that a person can know they’re a person even before they’ve collected half the chromosomes necessary to make a person into a person! And the Right to Life Association (RTLA), an organisation consisting mainly of ‘good Catholics’, was sufficiently impressed by the argument to publish this as a ’straight’ article titled ‘”So … When Does Life Begin?” - Another View of the Issue’.

When I realised where Deirdre was going, I thought it must be an April Fool’s joke, but no. It was printed in January of 1982 and no apologies or objections to the thesis appeared in subsequent issues of RTLA News.

Deirdre explained that she had been led to her conclusions by Dr Frank Lake, ‘a devout Anglican and leading English psychiatrist‘. Speaking at the Sixth International Transpersonal Psychology Conference at Cowes, Victoria in November 1980, Lake explained that he had been examining drawings done by ‘Primal Therapy’ patients. He began to wonder whether the drawings might be valid recordings of intra-uterine memories and asked colleagues about this:

To his amazement and joy, several colleagues had been thinking along similar lines for some time … Then Dr Lake proceeded to illustrate by slides the case-histories of several patients … proving the origins of some lifelong maladies; BUT, some patients RECORDED THEIR MEMORY OF BEING A SPERM, TRAVELLING UP THE FALLOPIAN TUBE (which Dr Lake calls the ‘blastocystic bliss’ …) AND DURING THERAPY SESSIONS, THEY ACTUALLY CRY OUT IN ECSTASY, WITH FULL CONSCIOUSNESS OF THEIR OWN PERSONHOOD - ‘OH MAN! THIS IS IT! GOD AND ME! WE’VE GOT IT ALL TOGETHER MAN!’

And this is BEFORE the sperm actually enters the uterus to join the ovum. (Deirdre’s emphases)

For the sake of brevity, let’s ignore Deirdre’s questionable grasp of physiology and plough on to the bitter end:

Dr Lake claimed that it is from this subconscious memory of the joy of such intimate union with God that some souls derive their vocation to the contemplative life …

So those who claim that life begins at twelve weeks, or fifteen weeks, or at birth, are mistaken. Life begins when the Almighty, in Love, bestows a psyche, or personhood, upon one sperm out of millions travelling up a fallopian tube …

Now here’s your Christmas puzzle. Prove her wrong!

Filed in: Abortion, Fundamentalism