Should the zygote be granted the status of a person? This is the burning question of our present age, while millions of human beings,once zygotes themselves, go hungry, have no shelter and whose futures are, by any measure, utterly bleak. If the zygote is a person, then what of its constituent parts, ovum and semen, are they equally in need of a protected status? Should the spilling of semen outside the confines of the marriage bed , in the act of procreation, be punishable as a capital crime? Is menstruation and the expulsion of unused ovum another instance of the need to harvest these nascent life forms, to save potential persons? These are matters that need our immediate moral/political attention. The status of the zygote must and will take center stage in the right to life movement, whose followers trample on the living in the name of a theology, a belief about what human life is or might be. Civic republican actors need a bit more empirical evidence before the steps here described can enacted in good faith.

Ghost of Aquinas