In his encyclopedic study of the abortion issue, Abortion, the Myths, the Realities, and the Arguments (1970), American philosopher Germain Grisez makes an important point that warrants further attention. He states that:

“since new human individuals develop from the union of sperm and ovum, it would be more accurate to speak of how life is transmitted, rather than how life begins . . . and if we just point to a certain moment when a new individual begins, it should be where the two halves . . . have completed the process of uniting with each other to form a whole. Certainly this has occurred before the first cell division.”

Grisez calls our attention to the notion of transmission as a more pertinent way of expressing the onset of new human life rather than discussing how life begins. Justice Blackmun, in writing the majority report for his infamous Roe v. Wade decision, declined to answer the question “when does life begin.” “We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins,” he wrote. “When those trained in medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.”

Blackmun was in error in requiring a “consensus.” Firm evidence would have been sufficient. The science of embryology provides firm evidence that life begins at conception. Thomas W. Hilgers, M.D. undertook the task of determining whether Blackmun or his staff had consulted textbooks on embryology and discovered that they had not. Hilgers reported that a number of scientific papers, textbooks, and reports between 1887 and 1971 all concluded that human life begins at conception.

Blackmun’s inadequate research and illogical conclusion cannot be excused. Nonetheless, it might have been more difficult for him to deny the fact that human life is transmitted from the parents to their offspring.

Transmission Rules Out the Question of Beginning

The question, “When does life begin?” suggests that there may have been a gap between conception and the beginning of life. The beginning of life, therefore, could occur at any number of moments. This would, indeed, be speculation. But there is a continuity between the life of the parents (male and female) and their child.

The notion of transmission rules out gaps as it establishes an unbroken continuity between the parents and their child. It provides a greater intimacy in the phenomenon of procreation. It avoids the notion that the parents produced something (sperm and egg) which some time after they fused produced something which later became the beginning of life of a new human being. “Transmission” unifies the parents and their child and overrides the question concerning when new life begins.

We speak of tradition as an unbroken way in which the best of the past is handed down to the present. Here the question of beginning is irrelevant. Transmission is about conveying something from one point to another without any intermittent diversions. Put simply, there is no intermission in transmission. Procreation, then, is the transmission of one life to another.

In purely material terms, parents transmit the foundational components of life to their offspring through heredity. On a deeper level, however, they transmit more than genes; they transmit life. And yet, life—which we experience on a metaphysical level, of a spiritual nature—eludes the grasp of science.

It has been said that education is the transmission of civilization; that art is the transmission of feeling; and that affection is the transmission of love. Transmission is progressive, forward-looking. This helps to explain how important it is to retain the word “transmission” with respect to the unbroken intimacy that transpires in the transmission of life to life.