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Vatican City, Apr. 20, 2006 (CNA) - Italian Vatican analyst Sandro Magister is releasing a long dialogue Cardinal  Martini sustained with Ignazio Marino, famous Italian bio-ethicist, and director of the Center of transplants of the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, about abortion, in-vitro fecundation and contraceptionAnd the answer is: “not immediatly with conception, but after” said Cardinal Martini, about when life starts, “with the consequences that derive from it,” added Magister. The long dialogue between the two men will be released in the next issue of the weekly “L’espresso,” a center-left weekly tomorrow,  it will be made available by Sandro...

POPE Benedict XVI said today that God makes no distinction between a human embryo and a child or adult. The Pope made his comments while hosting a Vatican-organised scientific conference on the status of the human embryo. "God's love doesn't make the distinction between the embryo inside its mother, the child, the youth, the mature adult or the elderly person," said the pope. The pontiff's statement reaffirmed the Catholic church's official position that "all human life is sacred and inviolable, from conception to its natural end". The Pontifical Academy for Life, an institute created in 1994 by the late John...

Human Embryo Is a Child, Says Bishop Sgreccia Promotes Bioethics Congress of Pontifical Academy for Life VATICAN CITY, FEB. 24, 2006 (Zenit.org).- The embryo, even if it is not being nurtured in a maternal uterus, is a child, said the president of the Pontifical Academy for Life. Bishop Elio Sgreccia said this in a press conference regarding the upcoming congress "The Human Embryo Prior to Implantation: Scientific Aspects and Bioethical Considerations," organized by the Pontifical organization in the Vatican on Feb. 27-28. "In any case, the embryo is a child: a boy or a girl, that has a special relationship...

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- While some scientists, legislators and even some parents see the human embryo as material that can be studied, frozen or destroyed, for the Catholic Church an embryo is human and has "a special relationship with God," said Bishop Elio Sgreccia. The bishop, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, said that before allowing scientists to study the possibilities for manipulating human embryos, wider society should be asking itself when does life begin and when does life begin to have value. Bishop Sgreccia and other experts from the academy met the press Feb. 24 to introduce a...

One reason that Roe v. Wade is still with us is that legal scholars and jurists argue about the wrong issue. The question isn’t whether the Constitution contains any reference to a right to privacy. Let’s assume it does. Let’s assume that the Ninth Amendment, as argued in Griswold v. Connecticut and some other cases, implicitly refers to the right to privacy every human being has. Why would this be relevant? Some might argue that if one has the right to privacy, a woman who has an abortion is doing something private, something no one else has the authority to...

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) -- Indiana women seeking an abortion would be told that life begins at conception under a proposal that would give the state one of the farthest-reaching abortion consent laws in the country. Only one state -- South Dakota -- has gone so far in what it orders doctors to tell women before they can get abortions, and a court has blocked that law. Supporters say the legislation would provide women key information before making an irreversible decision, but critics argue it blurs the line between church and state and could infringe on doctors' First Amendment rights. "To put...

Holy Days of Obligation, Or Holy Days of Opportunity Holy days are usually regarded in terms of obligation and imposition. But should they not be considered even more as graced times of opportunity to mark a special mystery of our faith? In recent years, holy days have come in for a good deal of discussion, evaluation and renewal. As early as the fourth century, St. John Chrysostom was concerned about the celebration of holy days in Constantinople. This Father and Doctor of the Church commented in a homily that "many people celebrate the holy days and know their names: but...

December 8, 2005Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary Psalm: Thursday 52 Reading IGn 3:9-15, 20 After the man, Adam, had eaten of the tree,the LORD God called to the man and asked him, “Where are you?”He answered, “I heard you in the garden;but I was afraid, because I was naked,so I hid myself.”Then he asked, “Who told you that you were naked?You have eaten, then,from the tree of which I had forbidden you to eat!”The man replied, “The woman whom you put here with me—she gave me fruit from the tree, and so I ate it.”The...

VATICAN, November 21, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Pope Benedict XVI addressed participants in a Health Care conference at the Vatican Saturday, on the topic of the human genome.  An analysis of scientific data, he said, reveals the dignity of human life "from the first moment of fecundation."  The statement is significant since it answers, for Catholics, questions surrounding the beginning of a right to life.  Many, some Catholics included, have wondered about the stage at which the embryo deserves protection.  Some have proposed that the morning after pill would avert abortion since it acts prior a modern definition of 'conception' which...

Mammalian sperm must reside in the female reproductive tract before they are able to undergo the acrosome reaction. This maturation process is called capacitation. The mammalian egg is surrounded by an extracellular envelope called the zona pellucida, to which sperm must bind and penetrate before they can make contact with the surface of the egg itself. The zona pellucida of the mouse egg contains three glycoproteins called ZP-1, ZP-2 and ZP-3 that polymerize to form a gel. The zona of newly-ovulated eggs is also surrounded by a constellation of follicle cells in a matrix of hyaluronic acid. Figure 1 shows...

... David Boonin, though not responding to George, also discounts the pro-lifer’s claim that the newly conceived embryo is a distinct, living, and whole human organism. How can this be, he argues, when we don’t know the precise moment during the conception process at which the new zygotic human being comes into existence? Here Boonin is both right and wrong. True, we don’t know exactly when during the conception process that the zygote comes to be. Some embryologists argue that it happens when the sperm penetrates the ovum while others point to syngamy, when the maternal and parental chromosomes crossover...

...The book begins with a discussion of the medical use of embryonic tissue and the debate over whether a blastocyst (which is a ball of a few hundred cells) is a person. This section is thoughtful, clearheaded and informed by developmental neuroscience. One fallacy Gazzaniga exposes depends on the common idea that graded differences block principled legal distinctions. In the version referred to as the fallacy of the beard, the logic goes like this: If we cannot say how long a man's whiskers must be to qualify as a beard, we cannot distinguish between a bearded man and a clean-shaven...

A young Israeli company called Fertiligent has devised a way to improve the effectiveness of a treatment for infertility. The technique could enable many more couples to conceive without having to resort to costly and invasive in-vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment. Infertility has become a growing problem in the western world, as an older pool of potential mothers and fathers, as well as environmental factors have made conceiving a baby more challenging. The National Center for Health Statistics, in Maryland, estimates that about 10 percent of the American childbearing population (or 6 million couples) suffers from infertility. This has led to...

How donated sperm spawned a child -- as well as a likely landmark legal decision ___ On paper, their initial agreement had the markings of an unusual but successful partnership. He was gay. She was lesbian. They were both unmarried. According to her attorney, they did not know each other all that well and had met through a hairdresser. She wanted badly to conceive a child, and he was willing to oblige. So when Sharon Sullivan and Brian Keith Russell signed a "co-parenting agreement" in February 2003, these star-crossed nonlovers probably had good reason to hope for a scientifically engineered,...

OK, I'm going to stick my neck waaaaaaay out and explain why I think we are celebrating Christ's conception, and not his birth, on Christmas. Which will explain why I think life begins at conception.

(Excerpts from the Catholic Encyclopedia entry) Immaculate Conception THE DOCTRINE In the Constitution Ineffabilis Deus, of 8 December, 1854, Pius IX pronounced and defined that the Blessed Virgin Mary "in the first instance of her conception, by a singular privilege and grace granted by God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the human race, was preserved exempt from all stain of original sin." PROOF FROM SCRIPTURE Genesis 3:15 No direct or categorical and stringent proof of the dogma can be brought forward from Scripture. But the first scriptural passage which contains the promise of the...

December 8, 2004Solemnity of the Immaculate Conceptionof the Blessed Virgin Mary Reading IGen 3:9-15, 20 After the man, Adam, had eaten of the tree,the LORD God called to the man and asked him, "Where are you?"He answered, "I heard you in the garden;but I was afraid, because I was naked,so I hid myself."Then he asked, "Who told you that you were naked?You have eaten, then,from the tree of which I had forbidden you to eat!"The man replied, "The woman whom you put here with me—she gave me fruit from the tree, and so I ate it."The LORD God then asked...

INEFFABILIS DEUS (The Immaculate Conception) Pope Pius IX Apostolic Constitution issued on December 8, 1854.God Ineffable—whose ways are mercy and truth, whose will is omnipotence itself, and whose wisdom "reaches from end to end mightily, and orders all things sweetly"—having foreseen from all eternity the lamentable wretchedness of the entire human race which would result from the sin of Adam, decreed, by a plan hidden from the centuries, to complete the first work of his goodness by a mystery yet more wondrously sublime through the Incarnation of the Word. This he decreed in order that man who, contrary to...

Come and show unity for the first and most fundamental of human rights. What: Life Chain (national) When: 2-3 p.m. Sunday, October 3 Where: Fred Meyer, Burlington, WA 920 S. Burlington Blvd. Burlington, WA 98233 Map Or, check with your own local pro-life organizations and churches. Bring a sign. Proverbs 24:11 [KJV] If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain; 24:12 If thou sayest, Behold, we knew it not; doth not he that pondereth the heart consider it? and he that keepeth thy soul, doth not he know it?...

Women Support Bush—Feminism is Dying September 30, 2004 http://www.mensnewsdaily.com/archive/s/sterrett/2004/sterrett093004.htm -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- by Isaiah Z. Sterrett -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE PAST FEW months have not been kind to feminists. There was John Kerry’s stunning admission that life begins at conception, followed by several additional stories, each of which punched a new hole in feminist propaganda. That Sen. Kerry believes life begins when a man’s sperm fertilizes a woman’s egg is commendable. This position may mark the first time in his career that he’s actually flip-flopped for the better; Kerry opposed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, and has been a reliable pro-abortion legislator for years....