The people you'd expect to be most coldly clinical about the beginnings of human life are actually the most sanguine:
In 1981 (April 23-24) a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee held hearings on the question "When does human life begin?" Appearing to speak on behalf of the scientific community was a group of internationally known geneticists and biologists who had the same story to tell, namely, that human life begins at conception - and they told their story with a profound absence of opposing testimony. Although the pro-choice community was invited to send any expert it wished to testify before the committee, none showed up. Of the 57 people who testified, one expressed an ambivalence about conception's being the beginning of human life . . . and he did so from a philosophical standpoint, not a scientific one.
*Dr. Micheline M. Mathews-Roth, Harvard medical School, gave confirming testimony, supported by references from over 20 embryology and other medical textbooks, that human life began at conception.
* "Father of Modern Genetics" Dr. Jerome Lejeune told the lawmakers: "To accept the fact that after fertilization has taken place a new human has come into being is no longer a matter of taste or opinion ... it is plain experimental evidence."
* Dr. Hymie Gordon, Chairman, Department of Genetics at the Mayo Clinic, added: "By all the criteria of modern molecular biology, life is present from the moment of conception."
* Dr. McCarthy de Mere, medical doctor and law professor, University of Tennessee, testified: "The exact moment of the beginning of personhood and of the human body is at the moment of conception."
* Dr. Alfred Bongiovanni, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, concluded, "I am no more prepared to say that these early stages 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." * Dr. Richard V. Jaynes: "To say that the beginning of human life cannot be determined scientifically is utterly ridiculous."
* Dr. Landrum Shettles, sometimes called the "Father of In Vitro Fertilization" notes, "Conception confers life and makes that life one of a kind." And on the Supreme Court ruling _Roe v. Wade_, "To deny a truth [about when life begins] should not be made a basis for legalizing abortion."
Professor Eugene Diamond: "...either the [Supreme Court] justices were fed a backwoods biology or they were pretending ignorance about a scientific certainty."
"* Dr. McCarthy de Mere, medical doctor and law professor, University of Tennessee, testified: "The exact moment of the beginning of personhood and of the human body is at the moment of conception."
Whether a fertlized ovum is a person, or should be treated as such in law, is not a testable scientific question. The statement of the doctor is not science.