(Carlos Barria/Reuters)

In a segment yesterday evening on Chris Cuomo’s primetime show, a CNN contributor and former New York City Democratic politician made a particularly unscientific assertion in defense of abortion rights. During a discussion about state-level “heartbeat bills,” which prohibit abortion after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, Christine Quinn claimed, “When a woman is pregnant, that is not a human being inside of her.”


Quinn, who served as the speaker of the New York City Council until 2013, is also a board member for the National Institute for Reproductive Health, a pro-abortion action fund. Her comment last night was, of course, factually and scientifically inaccurate by entirely objective standards.

Basic biology tells us that every pregnant woman is pregnant not with a horse or an acorn or a tumor but with another human being. Inside each pregnant woman is a human being that meets all the scientific criteria to be considered alive. Each embryo or fetus has human DNA, entirely distinct from that of both its mother and its father and, indeed, from every other human being that has ever existed or will ever exist for all of human history. Each of those developing human beings is inside its mother, yes, but not part of its mother. From the moment of conception, that unborn human being has all of the cells that will develop into fully functioning organs, into its own unique fingerprints, into its own heartbeat and neural tissue.

Birth does not magically confer humanity on that being. It was a human being from the start.


Progressives often accuse conservatives and pro-lifers of ignoring biological facts, of being “science deniers.” Abortion-rights advocates like Quinn are the real science deniers. She openly contradicts simple, scientific, biological facts for the sake of furthering her defense of the right to kill unborn human beings in the womb.


Her willingness to lie so blatantly is revealing. Why do pro-choice people blithely spew such ludicrous and unscientific nonsense as this? Because it is far easier to defend removing a “clump of cells” from a woman’s womb — to dismiss abortion as no different than having a tooth pulled — than it is to admit the biological fact that every abortion intentionally kills a living human being, and to defend it on those terms.

Here’s the segment from last night on CNN:

