Terry Turner, a resident of Colquitt County, is professor emeritus of urology at the University of Virginia as well as author of books based on his experiences as an infantry officer in Vietnam.

The Alabama Supreme Court recently granted personhood to human embryos. That finding fits the rhetoric of those in reproductive policy debates who express concern for the “unborn child.” The phrase is an oxymoron; its adjective cancels its noun, as in an humble brag or plastic silverware. The usage reflects either a lack of understanding of reproductive biology or a lack of interest in biology as a reference to reality. “Unborn child” is used, often with intention, because it elicits an emotional response to a reproductive event rather than a reasoned one. It’s a use of language to induce conformity of thought through sentiment where logic alone has not sufficed.

That method of debate has unfortunately become common in our social and political discourse and obscures issues where clarity is needed. Words have meaning and clarity demands they be used only where their meaning fits. A word’s meaning can change gradually over centuries or even decades, but it does not change instantly at the whim those who want to use words in a manipulative way. An example is assigning “racial differences” to all manner of problems that are, in reality, cultural differences; but activists know that pressing the race button will automatically bring up emotional images from both history and personal experience that will strongly influence a follower’s attitude.

“Unborn child,” or the Alabama Court’s usage for frozen embryos, “extrauterine children,” is a similar abuse of language. Those phrases are used because they conjure images of real children of various ages with faces, beautiful smiles and an ability to learn, communicate, and experience love. An embryo has none of those, which means there is no such thing as an unborn child. Rather, that early stage of development is first an embryo then, eventually, a fetus. A child appears only at birth. Children are sentient individuals, true persons with all the rights and privileges of the born.

An embryo is neither sentient nor an individual. It has no perception and cannot survive in nature outside the womb. As in everything from molecules to star systems, the potential thing is not the thing itself.

All that is an argument largely from biology and many would say it is irrelevant to the real driving force on the issue of when personhood is achieved. That driving force is one of religious conviction about the timing of ensoulment. To believers, the soul is the spiritual essence giving an individual religious identity; it’s the human’s spiritual connection to God. So the religious question is, when does the embryo gain a soul? Immediately? Never? To believers, this is important because that ensoulment is God’s induction of a new being. It is why the human individual is so important and possesses certain inalienable rights. That’s the connection: ensoulment and human rights.

Unfortunately, religions differ within and between themselves about when ensoulment occurs. Some say it occurs at conception, some say at a range of other times, and atheists say it doesn’t happen, at all! Opinions vary within Christianity, but the most energized activists at the moment are those who believe ensoulment occurs at conception; thus, they bring law suits insisting the embryo must be regarded as a person with all the rights and privileges that entails.

Our Founding Fathers recognized the reality of religious diversity and added the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to bar the government from “the establishment of religion.” The Alabama Supreme Court, while not saying so directly, has pronounced its “extrauterine children” finding based on one brand of Christian belief about ensoulment. That is establishing religion in law and has to be a violation of the First Amendment. Enforcing religious beliefs on those who do not hold those beliefs is a step toward sharia law, which we commonly deplore in other governments and should be interested in avoiding, ourselves.