American Lie League have a separate section, a front group, on their site which they currently call  the "American Bioethics Advisory Commission"   for the purpose of promoting a complete and total ban on human cloning among other things. Curiously, its name seems to have been chosen to engender confusion between itself and the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, the official Presidential advisory panel.

Their Roman Catholic brand of ethics shines through when a priest, Fr. Joseph C. Howard, Jr., M. Div, who will never personally have to encounter the 'ethical dilemma'  discusses the medical protocol for the treatment of ectopic pregnancies and advises against currently accepted standard medical practices.  He recommends the fallopian tube be removed rather than suction or abortifacient drugs, like Methotrexate, be used. They recognize the evil in their advice but would rather cling to their warped anti woman 'principles' than consider the actual patient they are talking about.  Again it's  a "Woman! - What woman?" approach

While it is acknowledged that removal of the tube containing the human embryo may result in sterility, it is not morally justified to directly attack human life by suctioning out the human embryo or administering methotrexate even though fertility is preserved.

The question as to when a human being begins is strictly a scientific question, and should be answered by human embryologists - not by philosophers, bioethicists, theologians, politicians, x-ray technicians, movie stars or obstetricians and gynecologists. Current discussions on abortion, human embryo research (including cloning, stem cell research and the formation of mixed-species chimeras) and the use of abortifacients involve specific claims as to when the life of every human being begins. The purpose of this article is to focus directly on just some of the "scientific" myths, and on the objective scientific facts that ought to ground these discussions. At least it will clarify what the actual international consensus of human embryologists is with regard to this relatively simple scientific question. If the "science" used to ground these various discussions is incorrect, then any conclusions will be rendered groundless and invalid.

-- what she is engaging in is an appeal to authority and it is a false appeal since

• Biologists and embryologists do not have a definition of life
• There is no consensus among biologists on this question and only those with a particular axe to grind have the gall to make pronouncements of the type she bases her argument on.
• Biologists can tell us when - approximately - a joining of haploids results in a diploid cell with unique DNA but DNA is not a human being and even at the unicellular stage the precursor of the placenta is present so her argument is based on a false premise to boot.
•  The 'authority' cited is anonymous and therefore less than useless as an authority.
• Since the authority is anonymous this is difficult to prove but I strongly suspect the authority has a vested interest in the outcome if only from a self serving theological perspective.

We, as a species, answered the question millennia ago. We know for certain that with birth comes a new member of our species. We also know that without successful birth there is no new member. That is the reason we use birth as our arbitrary starting point for rights and value granting.  Since, one thing science can confirm, life is a continuum any point we assign as a starting point will be arbitrary but of all the possible starting points birth is the most recognizable, most traumatic/dramatic, and can be witnessed by others.

Catholic 'philosophers' Beckwith and Kreeft recognized this and argued rights of personhood rather than present false appeals to authority by arguing irrelevant  'scientific facts'. They did not fall into the trap of defining " a human being" as a single celled organism (which definition it fails to meet BTW) with 46 chromosomes and miss the fact that some humans when born have 45 or 47 chromosomes, and of course a placenta or complete hydtidiform mole (a form of gestational cancer) also has 46 chromosomes and never will be a human being. Like Beckwith and Kreeft she argues totally from potential and ignores the fact that the potential may not be realized or present. Her major difference from them is that she spices her presentation with pop science to bolster her false argument.

As I've already said, Irving is one of the best in that bunch and makes an error in logic a 100 level student shouldn't make. She also, like the rest, brings her peculiar bias to the questions she tries to answer. Don't bet your life, or life quality, on their "ethics".

Eileen