By Andrea Widburg
Some leftists honestly acknowledge that a fetus is a human being but argue that the mother’s needs trump that baby’s life. Most, though, insist that the “miracle of birth” is just that—a miraculous moment when an inanimate, insensate lump of cells that has value only if the mother wants it magically converts into a human being, complete with rights. Science, however, again reveals that the real magic happens in the womb. This time, the magic is that babies are already learning language before they’re born.
I’ve always known about the connection between a verbal mother and a child who learns to speak well and quickly. Indeed, Gerry Charlotte Phelps, one of my early blog friends and a fascinating woman, made that point vividly when she wrote about working with women in terrible urban slums. On her now-defunct website, she said that these women never talked to their children except to threaten them with punishment. In this, they starkly contrasted with middle- and upper-middle-class mommies who never stopped talking to their children. The chatty mommies do so because they know it’s good for their child’s intellectual development.
Of course, all of that occurs after the baby is born. But what about before it’s born? Well, experiments are showing that, even in the womb, babies are developing language skills:
If you’re an expectant mother, chatting as much as possible could give your baby a headstart when it comes to learning to talk.
That’s because new research has found your unborn son or daughter will start learning the language you speak before they’re even born.
In experiments, researchers discovered heightened activity in the brains of newborns when they heard the language they were exposed to most often in utero.
The study didn’t look at exactly when babies become receptive to spoken language while they are still in the womb, although it’s well known that a foetus starts hearing sounds in the later stages of the second trimester and the start of the third.
Therefore, expectant mothers – and fathers too – should not be afraid to chat away, and even talk directly to their baby bump.
Babies in utero are not mere disposable clumps of cells unless you acknowledge that all humans are nothing more than clumps of cells. They are fully realized people, albeit at an early stage of development, and they have human brains that do human things, such as hearing words and learning language. Regardless of where you want to come down on the abortion issue, you would do well to remember that, when leftists tell you there is no life before birth, they are lying.
