Quite right xoddam that goes without saying.

Why then is it such a stretch to say that it is a scientific fact an egg, if left alone with a sperm and a healthy mother will become a bouncing baby?

We can begin the process where ever we choose...

It is a basic scientific fact that a healthy man left with a healthy man, will turn out a bouncing baby boy or girl. etc, etc, etc.

I reckon a case could be made that you don't have 'real' human life until that moment when the baby starts to look around and take it all in. Usually several weeks after birth. That's the beginning of consciousness and the first sign of a real little person emerging.

Oops, I mean't a healthy man left with a healthy WOMAN.

Yikes.

He's perfectly correct, of course. I suppose this gives rise to the possibility that the right-to-life squad will call for bans on masturbation by men and menstruation by women :O

Seriously though, Michael Lardelli asks the wrong question. Instead of "When does a human become human", it would be more pertinent to consider "When does a human foetus become a human person". This is because it's the social meanings of humanity that cause the ethical dilemmas and controversies around issues like abortion, contraception, stem-cell research etc, as opposed to biological/genetic considerations.

Mind you, the apparent immortality of human genes in sperm and ova is something I hadn't thought about in quite those terms before. Thanks for that!

We’re each the product of genetic evolution stretching back over millions of years and generations. The materials in our bodies have been around billions of years, and some were forged in the deaths of ancient star systems. Our physical components will be recycled, and possibly our genetic blueprints recombined and reproduced, for even more millennia to come.

These are marvels that science has helped to describe, but they do not begin to define in full the meanings of a human life, still less to demonstrate that human life has no beginning (or presumably, end).

It is the characteristic arrogance of some scientists to assume that all that can be usefully said of a subject can be reduced to the tenets of their own discipline – in this case, genetic determinism, with the “life” of the sperm and the “life” of the egg giving rise to the life of a person.

But the energetic sperm wriggling under a microscope is “alive” only in the limited and qualified manner of a lizard’s tail detached and wriggling furiously as a decoy in the garden. The “life” of these objects cannot be equated with the life of an intelligent, able-bodied and self-aware human person.

If we discount the prejudicial intent in the religious overtones of the statement “I have no way of detecting or measuring the soul or any other aspect of spirituality”, it tends to refute rather than prove the author’s point. As a researcher in developmental genetics, the author does indeed lack the equipment or techniques to measure such things. But that does not mean that the “soul” – or, in secular language, the unique, self-aware, individual personality that is a human being – does not exist.

For all the problems we have in identifying the point at which a human life can be said to begin, the dignity of human beings should be in the forefront of our consideration ethics of human reproductive technology, not the biology of embryo development, and still less the bizarre and ethically incoherent objective of seeing ourselves in the eyes of “our non-human relatives”

First of all I do wish to compliment Michael for his enjoyable writing. As a person who does not normally follow biological issues, etc in that manner I found the article pleasant to read.
As author of books in the INSPECTOR-RIKATI® series about constitutional and other legal issues I deem it essential to bring across to a reader what one seeks to convey, and I view Michael did so.
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Michael did seek to elicit what the views were of others, and my view is that the creation of life should be deemed from time of conception.
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Why should it be all right for a woman to abort at anytime, but if the pregnancy was aborted by a person using violence then the person could be charged for a crime not just against the mother but also against the unborn baby?
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We, as a society should recognise that an expected “mother” is an expected “mother” because of the child, regardless of being unborn and regardless of how long after conception took place. She is not expecting, so to say, some “peanut” to grow in her but some living creature under whatever title you may bestow onto it, that eventually will for all intents to be become a living human being in its own right.
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From the moment of conception the female has control over two bodies, and feeding both, that of herself and that of the child growing inside of her. For all purposes we should take the time of conception as being the creation of another human being and with it all social and other human attributes entitlements to it.
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I do not practice any religion and as such have no such pre-conceived idea’s. I do know however that had my parents opted for abortion then none of you would have been able to read my writings, and likewise so if any of the readers parents had opted for abortion. Hence, we, as did our parents in our circumstance, should respect life to be created from conception.