Bishop Donald Hying of Madison, Wisconsin, blasted President Joe Biden Friday for reversing his earlier position that human life begins at conception.
“People always claimed that President Biden was personally opposed to abortion,” Bishop Hying wrote on Twitter. “Today, he said, ‘I respect those who believe life begins at the moment of conception and all, I respect that-don’t agree, but I respect that.’”
“Today, we’ve all learned the painful and disturbing truth,” the bishop concluded.
As recently as 2015, Biden said he was “prepared to accept that the moment of conception is a human life and being,” a position he has now reversed, in stark contradiction to scientific fact.
One of the standard medical texts in the field of embryology, called Patten’s Foundations of Embryology, states simply, “Almost all higher animals start their lives from a single cell, the fertilized ovum (zygote). … The time of fertilization represents the starting point in the life history, or ontogeny, of the individual.”
For its part, William Larsen’s classic Human Embryology declares:
The chromosomes of the oocyte and sperm are…respectively enclosed within female and male pronuclei. These pronuclei fuse with each other to produce the single, diploid, 2N nucleus of the fertilized zygote. This moment of zygote formation may be taken as the beginning or zero time point of embryonic development.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that “the first moment of his existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person – among which is the inviolable right of every innocent being to life”:
A pregnant Albanin woman watches her baby in the monitor as a doctor performs a sonogram in Tirana on November 9, 2011. In Albania, abortion was legalised on the eve of the Communist regime’s fall in the 1990s. Since then, it has become almost a favourite method to chose the sex of its child, several local rights groups warn. According to a law adopted in April 2002, sex-selective abortion is forbidden, but there are no specific sanctions for breaching the law, experts say (AFP PHOTO / GENT SHKULLAKU).
The Catholic Church, to which Biden belongs, considers abortion to be murder and attaches its highest penalty — that of automatic excommunication — to anyone who “procures a completed abortion”:
Democratic presidential candidate and former US Vice President Joe Biden visits Grace Lutheran Church in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on September 3, 2020, in the aftermath of the police shooting of Jacob Blake (Photo by JIM WATSON / AFP) (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images).
Just this week, Pope Francis compared aborting a child to hiring a hitman to assassinate somebody who gets in our way.
“It is a life. A human life. Some say, ‘It’s not a person.’ It is a human life!” the pontiff said in regard to the status of the unborn child.
“So, faced with a human life I ask myself two questions: Is it licit to eliminate a human life to solve a problem, is it fair to eliminate a human life to solve a problem?” he continued. “Second question: Is it right to hire a paid assassin to solve a problem?”
“We are living in a throwaway culture. What is useless is discarded,” he said. In the “collective unconscious” of the throwaway culture, “the old … and the terminally ill; and the unwanted children, they are returned to sender before they are born.”
Biden has a history of changing his positions on abortion and abortion funding, adopting over the years a more and more radical pro-abortion stance and evolving into a fulsome supporter of abortion giant Planned Parenthood.
In June 2019, Biden declared his opposition to the Hyde Amendment — which prevents taxpayer funds from being used to fund abortions — for the first time, flip-flopping on a position he had held for decades.
Biden said although he supported the Hyde Amendment as a United States senator, he realized “times have changed.”
“For many years as U.S. Senator, I have supported the Hyde Amendment like many many others have,” he said.
Biden said he never wanted to impose on others his views concerning when life begins and, therefore, would never impose his beliefs on payment for abortions.