When Life Begins - by Real Geneticists, Med.School Textbooks, Molecular Biologists, SCIENTISTS
[Orignally posted in 2008 as a response to CINO (Catholics in Name Only) Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi for misleading real Catholics into thinking abortion and abortifacient medications like contraception are acceptable to Catholics]:
In Roe v. Wade, the justices refused to answer the question, “When does human life begin?” which led to the confusion Pelosi, Biden and many others still share. The Supreme Court treated it as solely a philosophical question back then. Since then, as the scientific evidence and testimony shows, human life has been shown scientifically to begin at conception. This is a scientific fact now known for many years by world-renowned embryologists and other human biologists, as well as taught from medical school textbooks and testified to under sworn oath to Congress.
Science, since 1973, conclusively tells us that human life begins at conception (also known as fertilization), not at birth.
It is not a matter of "faith" nor a "belief," "religious," "philosophical," "personal" or otherwise.
Further confusion results when some in the medical profession choose to rewrite textbooks to contradict those expert scientists’ findings, and even to rewrite the ancient doctors' oath, the Hippocratic Oath, to allow abortion. Don't take my word for it. Research it yourselves. Google the phrases "I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy" and then this phrase, ""it may also be within my power to take a life" and tell me it doesn't open Pandora's box further to allow euthanasia against someone's will when the doctor thinks it's best. Because it most certainly does and that is not an opinion but fact. (We have Tufts University's Dean of the School of Medicine to thank for that latter "modern" version, written apparently in 1964)
Below are the online Internet links for folks to find the above embryologists' and textbooks' quotes and facts for yourselves, but feel free to do your own research. You'll find many medical professionals who flout the scientific fact that a new human life begins at every conception but there is no denying the fact that those professionals are going completely opposite of the true experts, the human embryologists noted above.
Never underestimate that some medical professionals recognize a lucrative, prosperous specialty (abortion and its related procedures) when some of them see it.
Hearings on S. 158 Before the Subcommittee on Separation of Powers of the Senate Judiciary Committee, 97th Cong., 1st Sess. (1981), answering the question, “When does human life begin?”
400,000 People and Counting, by Brad Harrub, Ph.D.
Information on the hearing is here: Can Congress Settle the Abortion Issue?, by Mary C. Segers © 1982 The Hastings Center
The Association of Pro-Life Physicians
University of North Texas
Carnegie Stages of Developments
Textbooks are not online, but there are references to them by experts (and students perhaps using these very textbooks):
Oxford Journals, Human Reproduction, Volume 20, Number 11 Pp. 3008-3011
Dianne N. Irving, M.A., Ph.D.
THE ENDOWMENT FOR HUMAN DEVELOPMENT, INC. (“Embryo — means “growing within” and refers to the “human offspring in the first eight weeks following fertilization”)
Princeton Students Pro-Life Group
- From the Hearings on S. 158 Before the Subcommittee on Separation of Powers of the Senate Judiciary Committee, 97th Cong., 1st Sess. (1981):
Dr. Landrum Shettles, known as the ‘father of in vitro fertilization:’ “Conception confers life and makes that life one of a kind.” - Dr. Jerome Lejeune (discovered Down Syndrome’s genetic cause): “To accept the fact that after fertilization has taken place a new human has come into being is no longer a matter of taste or opinion…it is plain experimental evidence.”
- Dr. Hymie Gordon, Chairman of the Department of Genetics at the Mayo Clinic: “By all the criteria of modern molecular biology, life is present from the moment of conception.”
- Dr. Alfred M. Bongioanni, Professor of pediatrics/obstetrics at Ivy-League University of Pennsylvania: “I have learned from my earliest medical education that human life begins at the time of conception… human life is present throughout this entire sequence from conception to adulthood and that any interruption at any point throughout this time constitutes a termination of human life. I am no more prepared to say that these early stages [of development in the womb] represent an incomplete human being than I would be to say that the child prior to the dramatic effects of puberty… is not a human being. This is human life at every stage.”
- Dr. Watson A. Bowes, University of Colorado Medical School: “The beginning of a single human life is from a biological point of view a simple and straightforward matter-- the beginning is conception.”
- Dr. Micheline Mathews-Roth of Harvard Medical School also testified, citing over 20 embryology/medical textbooks that human life begins at conception, including:
- Ronan O'Rahilly, International Board Member, Nomina Embryologica (the international body determining correct human embryology terminologies in textbooks), and an original founder of The Carnegie Stages of Early Human Embryological Development, in his med school textbook, Human Embryology & Teratology (New York: Wiley-Liss, 2001, O'Rahilly and Muller): “Just as postnatal age begins at birth, prenatal age begins at fertilization.” (p. 88)
- O'Rahilly and Fabiola Muller, Human Embryology & Teratology (New York: Wiley-Liss, 1994): “Fertilization is an important landmark because a new, genetically distinct human organism is thereby formed. (p. 5); The zygote ... is a unicellular embryo.” (p. 19).
- William Larsen, Human Embryology (New York: Churchill Livingstone, 1997): “the male and female sex cells, which will unite at fertilization to initiate the embryonic development of a new individual. ... Embryonic development is considered to begin at this point.” (p. 1).
- Keith L. Moore, The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology (2nd Ed., 1977): “The cell (a single-celled zygote) results from fertilization of an oocyte by a sperm and is the beginning of human life.”
In Roe v. Wade, the justices refused to answer the question, “When does human life begin?” which led to the confusion Pelosi, Biden and many others still share. The Supreme Court treated it as solely a philosophical question back then. Since then, as the scientific evidence and testimony shows, human life has been shown scientifically to begin at conception. This is a scientific fact now known for many years by world-renowned embryologists and other human biologists, as well as taught from medical school textbooks and testified to under sworn oath to Congress.
Science, since 1973, conclusively tells us that human life begins at conception (also known as fertilization), not at birth.
It is not a matter of "faith" nor a "belief," "religious," "philosophical," "personal" or otherwise.
Further confusion results when some in the medical profession choose to rewrite textbooks to contradict those expert scientists’ findings, and even to rewrite the ancient doctors' oath, the Hippocratic Oath, to allow abortion. Don't take my word for it. Research it yourselves. Google the phrases "I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy" and then this phrase, ""it may also be within my power to take a life" and tell me it doesn't open Pandora's box further to allow euthanasia against someone's will when the doctor thinks it's best. Because it most certainly does and that is not an opinion but fact. (We have Tufts University's Dean of the School of Medicine to thank for that latter "modern" version, written apparently in 1964)
Below are the online Internet links for folks to find the above embryologists' and textbooks' quotes and facts for yourselves, but feel free to do your own research. You'll find many medical professionals who flout the scientific fact that a new human life begins at every conception but there is no denying the fact that those professionals are going completely opposite of the true experts, the human embryologists noted above.
Never underestimate that some medical professionals recognize a lucrative, prosperous specialty (abortion and its related procedures) when some of them see it.
Hearings on S. 158 Before the Subcommittee on Separation of Powers of the Senate Judiciary Committee, 97th Cong., 1st Sess. (1981), answering the question, “When does human life begin?”
400,000 People and Counting, by Brad Harrub, Ph.D.
Information on the hearing is here: Can Congress Settle the Abortion Issue?, by Mary C. Segers © 1982 The Hastings Center
The Association of Pro-Life Physicians
University of North Texas
Carnegie Stages of Developments
Textbooks are not online, but there are references to them by experts (and students perhaps using these very textbooks):
Oxford Journals, Human Reproduction, Volume 20, Number 11 Pp. 3008-3011
Dianne N. Irving, M.A., Ph.D.
THE ENDOWMENT FOR HUMAN DEVELOPMENT, INC. (“Embryo — means “growing within” and refers to the “human offspring in the first eight weeks following fertilization”)
Princeton Students Pro-Life Group
posted by Annie at 6:48 AM
