There is a wonderful irony here. It is this: The onset of individual
life is not a dogma of the church but a fact of science. How much more
convenient if we lived in the 13th century, when no one knew anything
about microbiology and arguments about the onset of life were
legitimate. Compared to a modern textbook of embryology, Thomas
Aquinas sounds like an American Civil Liberties Union member.
Nowadays it is not some misguided ecclesiastics who are trying to
suppress an embarrassing scientific fact. It is the secular juridical-
journalistic establishment.
Please indulge the novelist if he thinks in novelistic terms. Picture
the scene. A Galileo trial in reverse. The Supreme Court is
cross-examining a high school biology teacher and admonishing him
that of course it is only his personal opinion that the fertilized human
ovum is an individual human life.
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