NOTICE: The following
article is written by the author itself and not by me, I am not trying to
violate their copyright. I will give some information on them.
PAGE TITLE: http://www.humanlife.org/index.php
ARTICLE
TITLE:
Scientists Attest to Life Beginning at Conception
DATE: N.A
AUTHOR: Randy Alcorn
AUTHOR
INFORMATION: Randy Alcorn (born 1954) is an American Protestant author
and director of Eternal Perspective Ministries, a non-profit Christian
organization dedicated to teaching an eternal viewpoint and helping the needy
of the world. He has written several novels, including Deadline, Dominion,
and Deception. He received a Gold Medallion Book Award in 2003 for his
novel Safely Home. He has also written a number of non-fiction books,
including Heaven, The Purity Principle, and The Treasure
Principle. Eternal Perspective Ministries owns the royalties to his books
and 100 percent of them are given away to support missions, famine relief, pro-life
work, and other ministries.
He and his wife, Nanci, have two grown up and
married daughters, Karina and Angela, who assisted him in writing the novel The
Ishbane Conspiracy in 2001. Randy and Nanci have four grandsons. They live
in Gresham, Oregon.
He wrote a book similar to The Screwtape
Letters called Lord Foulgrin's Letters. In Alcorn's book, references
are made to demons, known only as "ST" and "WW" (for it had
become a crime in Hell to even speak their real names), who had their letters
found by a human and were punished by Beelzebub for their incompetence. He has
also written a sequel to Lord Foulgrin's Letters entitled The Ishbane
Conspiracy in which Lord Foulgrin from the first book is put on probation
and is receiving letters from a senior demon named Prince Ishbane. In between
the letters actual scenes from the humans lives unfold.
In November 2009, Alcorn signed an ecumenical
statement known as the Manhattan Declaration calling on Evangelicals,
Catholics and Orthodox not to comply with rules and laws permitting abortion,
same-sex marriage and other matters that go against their religious consciences.
 | |
| Randy Alcorn |
Scientists Attest to Life Beginning at Conception
by Randy
Alcorn
Some of
the world's most prominent scientists and physicians testified to a U.S. Senate
committee that human life begins at conception:
A United
States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee invited experts to testify on the question
of when life begins. All of the quotes from the following experts come directly
from the official government record of their testimony.1
Dr.
Alfred M. Bongioanni, professor of pediatrics and obstetrics at the University
of Pennsylvania, stated:
"I
have learned from my earliest medical education that human life begins at the
time of conception.... I submit that 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.
Jerome LeJeune, professor of genetics at the University of Descartes in Paris,
was the discoverer of the chromosome pattern of Downs syndrome. Dr. LeJeune
testified to the Judiciary Subcommittee, "after fertilization has taken
place a new human being has come into being." He stated that this "is
no longer a matter of taste or opinion," and "not a metaphysical
contention, it is plain experimental evidence." He added, "Each
individual has a very neat beginning, at conception."
Professor
Hymie Gordon, Mayo Clinic: "By all the criteria of modern molecular
biology, life is present from the moment of conception."
Professor
Micheline Matthews-Roth, Harvard University Medical School: "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.... Our laws, one function of which is to help preserve the lives of
our people, should be based on accurate scientific data."
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. This straightforward
biological fact should not be distorted to serve sociological, political, or
economic goals."
A
prominent physician points out that at these Senate hearings,
"Pro-abortionists, though invited to do so, failed to produce even a
single expert witness who would specifically testify that life begins at any
point other than conception or implantation. Only one witness said no one can
tell when life begins."2
Many
other prominent scientists and physicians have likewise affirmed with certainty
that human life begins at conception:
Ashley
Montague, a geneticist and professor at Harvard and Rutgers, is unsympathetic
to the pro-life cause. Nevertheless, he affirms unequivocally, "The basic
fact is simple: life begins not at birth, but conception."3
Dr.
Bernard Nathanson, internationally known obstetrician and gynecologist, was a
cofounder of what is now the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). He
owned and operated what was at the time the largest abortion clinic in the
western hemisphere. He was directly involved in over sixty thousand abortions.
Dr.
Nathanson's study of developments in the science of fetology and his use of
ultrasound to observe the unborn child in the womb led him to the conclusion
that he had made a horrible mistake. Resigning from his lucrative position,
Nathanson wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine that he was deeply
troubled by his "increasing certainty that I had in fact presided over
60,000 deaths."4
In his
film, The Silent Scream, Nathanson later stated, "Modern technologies have
convinced us that beyond question the unborn child is simply another human
being, another member of the human community, indistinguishable in every way
from any of us." Dr. Nathanson wrote Aborting America to inform the public
of the realities behind the abortion rights movement of which he had been a primary
leader.5 At the time, Dr. Nathanson was an atheist. His conclusions
were not even remotely religious, but squarely based on the biological facts.
Dr.
Landrum Shettles was the attending obstetrician-gynecologist at
Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York for 27 years. Shettles was a
pioneer in sperm biology, fertility, and sterility. He is internationally
famous for being the discoverer of male- and female-producing sperm. His
intrauterine photographs of preborn children appear in over fifty medical
textbooks. Dr. Shettles states,
"I
oppose abortion. I do so, first, because I accept what is biologically
manifest-that human life commences at the time of conception - and, second,
because I believe it is wrong to take innocent human life under any
circumstances. My position is scientific, pragmatic, and humanitarian.6"
The First
International Symposium on Abortion came to the following conclusion:
The
changes occurring between implantation, a six-week embryo, a six-month fetus, a
one-week-old child, or a mature adult are merely stages of development and
maturation. The majority of our group could find no point in time between the
union of sperm and egg, or at least the blastocyst stage, and the birth of the
infant at which point we could say that this was not a human life.7
The
Official Senate report on Senate Bill 158, the "Human Life Bill,"
summarized the issue this way:
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.8
Footnotes:
1.
Report, Subcommittee on Separation of Powers to Senate Judiciary Committee
S-158, 97th Congress, 1st Session 1981.
2.
Landrum Shettles and David Rorvik, Rites of Life: The Scientific Evidence of
Life Before Birth (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1983), 113.
3. Ashley
Montague, Life Before Birth (New York: Signet Books, 1977), vi.
4.
Bernard N. Nathanson, "Deeper into Abortion," New England Journal of
Medicine 291 (1974): 1189_90.
5.
Bernard Nathanson, Aborting America (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979).
6.
Shettles and Rorvik, Rites of Life, 103.
7. John
C. Willke, Abortion Questions and Answers (Cincinnati, OH: Hayes Publishing,
1988), 42.
8.
Report, Subcommittee on Separation of Powers to Senate Judiciary Committee
S-158, 97th Congress, 1st Session 1981, 7.
Eternal
Perspective Ministries, 2229 E. Burnside #23, Gresham, OR 97030, 503-663-6481,
www.epm.org
No comments:
Post a Comment