My mom is a devout Southern Baptist Christian. Her son grew up to be an award-winning stem-cell biologist. Our understanding of scientific facts and our personal religious beliefs are not in conflict, yet during the public debates on human-embryonic-stem-cell research in the 2000s, the fact that my father was a Baptist minister made some people think they could just dismiss anything I had to say about when a human life begins.
More than 20 years later, similarly baseless arguments are cropping up in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. Late last month, Jefferson circuit-court judge Mitch Perry granted EMW Women’s Surgical Center and Planned Parenthood a temporary injunction blocking Kentucky’s legal ban on most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. (The law allows for pregnancy terminations beyond the six-week cutoff when they are required to save the life of the mother.) As a basis for his ruling, which was overturned by a Kentucky appeals court on Monday, Judge Perry wrote that the state’s argument that life begins at the very moment of fertilization is “a distinctly Christian and Catholic belief.”
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