“The birth of a human life really occurs at the moment the mother’s egg cells is fertilized by one of the father’s sperm cells.”
“Drama of Life Before Birth” Life Magazine April 1965, cited in “The Facts of Life” Life Messengers,
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Dr. George W Corner On Fertilization
Dr. George W Corner, the endocrinologist and research scientist who first isolated and identified the female hormone progesterone, said in the 1940s:
“The fertilization of an egg by the sperm is one of the greatest wonders of nature, an event in which magnificently small fragments of…life are driven by cosmic forces to their appointed end, the growth of a living human being. As a spectacle, it can be compared only with an eclipse of the sun, or the eruption of a volcano. It is in fact the most common and nearest to us of nature’s cataclysms, and yet is very seldom observed because it occurs in a row most people never see – the region of microscopic things.”
Quoted in Nathanson, Bernard N, M.D The Hand of God: a Journey from Death to Life by the Abortion Doctor Who Changed His Mind (Washington DC: Regnery Publishing Inc, 1996) 129 – 130
Share on FacebookScientist on When Life Begins
“These pronuclei [of the sperm and oocyte] fuse with each other to produce the single, diploid 2N nucleus of the fertilized zygote. This moment of zygote formation may be taken as the beginning or zero time point of embryonic development.”
Norman Ford, “When Did I Begin?” (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 115
Share on FacebookHarvard Medical School Physician: Life Begins at Conception
“….it is scientifically correct to say that human life begins at conception.”
Dr. Micheline Matthews-Roth, Harvard Medical School: Quoted by Public Affairs Council
Share on FacebookDr. Landrum Shettles On When Life Begins
Shettles, Landrum, M.D., Rorvik, David, Rites of Life: The Scientific Evidence for Life Before Birth, page 36, Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1983
Share on Facebook“… Conception confers life and makes you one of a kind. Unless you have an identical twin, there is virtually no chance, in the natural course of things, that there will be “another you” – not even if mankind were to persist for billions of years.”
Individual Life Begins at Conception, Say Doctors
D.J. Moran, M.D., J.D. Gorby, M.D., and T.W. Hilgers, M.E., “Abortion in the Supreme Court: Death Becomes a Way of Life.”, Sheed and Ward, 1974
Share on Facebook“Individual human life begins at conception and is a progressive, ongoing continuum until natural death. This is a fact so well established that no intellectually honest physician in full command of modern medical knowledge would dare to deny it. There is no authority in medicine or biology who can be cited to refute this concept. It is not a “theory,” as Justice Blackmun wished to easily pass it off.”
Former President of the National Medical Association: “Life Begins at Conception”
From Newsweek November 12, 1973:
“Human life begins when the ovum is fertilized and the new combined cell mass begins to divide.”
Dr. Jasper Williams, Former President of the National Medical Association (p 74)
Share on FacebookScientists Speak before the Senate: Human Life Begins at Conception
In 1981 (April 23-24) a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee held hearings on the very question before us here: When does human life begin? Appearing to speak on behalf of the scientific community was a group of internationally-known geneticists and biologists who had the same story to tell, namely, that human life begins at conception – and they told their story with a complete absence of opposing testimony. (Subcommittee on Separation of Powers to Senate Judiciary Committee S-158, Report, 97th Congress, 1st Session, 1981):
*** Dr. Micheline M. Mathews-Roth, Harvard medical School, gave confirming testimony, supported by references from over 20 embryology and other medical textbooks that human life began at conception.
“It is incorrect to say that biological data cannot be decisive…It is scientifically correct to say that an individual human life begins at conception.”
***”Father of Modern Genetics” Dr. Jerome Lejeune told the lawmakers:
“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. Each individual has a very neat beginning, at conception.”
*** Dr. McCarthy de Mere, medical doctor and law professor, University of Tennessee, testified:
“The exact moment of the beginning of personhood and of the human body is at the moment of conception.”
*** Dr. Alfred Bongiovanni, Professor of Pediatrics and Obstetrics, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, concluded,
“I am no more prepared to say that these early stages 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….I have learned from my earliest medical education that human life begins at the time of conception.”
***Dr. Richard V. Jaynes:
“To say that the beginning of human life cannot be determined scientifically is utterly ridiculous.”
***Dr. Landrum Shettles, sometimes called the “Father of In Vitro Fertilization” notes
“Conception confers life and makes that life one of a kind.”
And on the Supreme Court ruling Roe v. Wade,
“To deny a truth [about when life begins] should not be made a basis for legalizing abortion.”
*** Professor Eugene Diamond:
“…either the justices were fed a backwoods biology or they were pretending ignorance about a scientific certainty.”
***Gordon, Hymie, M.D., F.R.C.P., Chairman of Medical Genetics, Mayo Clinic, Rochester:
“By all criteria of modern molecular biology,life is present from the moment of conception…Science has a very simple conception of man; as soon as he has been conceived, a man is a man.”
** C. Christopher Hook, M.D. Oncologist, Mayo Clinic, Director of Ethics Education, Mayo Graduate School of Medicine:
“When fertilization is complete, a unique genetic human entity exists.”
The official Senate report reached this conclusion:
Share on Facebook“Physicians, biologists, and other scientists agree that conception marks the beginning of the life of a human being – a being that is alive and is a member of the human species. There is overwhelming agreement on this point in countless medical, biological, and scientific writings.”
California Medicine: “Semantic Gymnastics” Needed to Justify Abortion
From California Medicine 113, no.3 (1970), reprinted in The Human Life Review 1, no.1 (1975): 103-4.
“…since the old ethic has not been fully displaced it has been necessary to separate the idea of abortion from the idea of killing, which continues to be socially abhorrent. The result has been a curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous whether intra- or extra-uterine until death. The very considerable semantic gymnastics which are required to rationalize abortion as anything but taking a human life would be ludicrous if they were not often put forth under socially impeccable auspices. It is suggested that this schizophrenic sort of subterfuge is necessary because while a new ethic is being accepted the old one has not yet been rejected.”
“…each of us has a unique beginning, the moment of conception…As soon as the twenty-three chromosomes carried by the sperm encounter the twenty-three chromosomes carried by the ovum, the whole information necessary and sufficient to spell out all the characteristics of the new being is gathered…(W)hen this information carried by the sperm and by the ovum has encountered each other, then a new human being is defined which has never occurred before and will never occur again…[the zygote, and the cells produced in the succeeding divisions] is not just simply a non-descript cell, or a “population” or loose “collection” of cells, but a very specialized individual, i.e., someone who will build himself according to his own rule.”
(As quoted in Linacre Quarterly, February, 1993)
Share on FacebookTextbook “Developmental Anatomy” at on the Beginning of Life
“The formation, maturation and meeting of a male and female sex cell are all preliminary to their actual union into a combined cell, or zygote, which definitely marks the beginning of a new individual. The penetration of the ovum by the spermatozoon, and the coming together and pooling of their respective nuclei, constitutes the process of fertilization.”
Leslie Brainerd Arey, “Developmental Anatomy” seventh edition space (Philadelphia: Saunders, 1974), 55
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