When Did You Become a Complete Human Being? Impossible as it may seem to some readers, we each begin our life as a complete human being, as we shall see;  and our beginning occurs  "...when a wriggling sperm plunges head-long into a mature ovum or egg [M.A. Gilbert]." Wrote researchers Horan, Gorby, and Hilgers:  "Individual human life begins at conception  ...  This is a fact so well established that no intellectually honest physician in full command of modern medical knowledge would dare to deny it.  There is no authority in medicine or biology who can be cited to refute this concept." "But does that mean this young life is complete?" one may ask. Responds noted French geneticist Dr. Jerome Lejeune, discoverer of Down's Syndrome:  "If a fertilized egg is not by itself a full human being it could not become a nam, because something would have to be added to it, and we know that does not happen ...  This is not opinion; it is a fact." How then can abortion be legal, expecially in America? For an answer, let us scan histroy and recall institutionalslavery and sweat shops, and civil rights atrocities, all on our soil.  Elsewhere, the gulag, Auschwitz, and virtual genocide against segments of a population come to mind - all legal at the time.  We must realize America is not immune to grave injustice - and we must end our own holocaust, which has claimed over 50 million lives. A Closer Look At The Evidence For further insight into when human life begins, let's look not to theologeons and philosiphers, but to biologists, whom the Supreme Court chose to ignore in 1973. Here we meet Leo Schneider, who reminds us that "You are composed of trillions of cells now, but at one time you were just a single cell."  Yet, as a single cell, "you" were informationally complete and unique, with sufficient content to fill "1000" volumes of Encyclopaedia Britanica. "The position of Modern Science on the Beginning of Human Life" answers the question "When did your life begin?" by taking us back in time, as follows:  "Before you were an adult, you were an adolescent, and before that a child, and before that an infant.  Before you were an infant - i.e., before you were born - you were a fetus, and before that an embryo.  Before you were an embryo, around the time of your own implantation, you were a blastocyst, and before that a morula, and before that a zygote or fertilized ovum.  However, you were never a sperm or ovum.  Therefore, while life is continuous, your life began when the nucleus of your father's sperm fused with the nucleus of your mother's ovum, or at fertilization." Or in the words of Ingleman, Sundberg and Wirsen:  "When does an embryo in a human mother become a human being?  It has been one all the time, since the moment of conception.  "To which Thomas W. Hilgers has added:  "It is at this moment that a totally new and unique individual, never before in existence and never again to be duplicated, comes to be." Humanhood is, therefore, a progression of the same person from conception to old age and death, and both Webster and biology define 'person' as "an individual human being." U.S. Congressional Hearings In 1981 (April 23-24) a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee held hearings on the very question before us here:  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 pronounced absence of opposing testimony. "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 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 Tennessaa, 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 geing than I would be to say that the child prior to the dramic effects of puberty  ...  is not a human being. Dr. Micheline M. Mathews-Roth, Harvard Medical School, gave confirming testimony, supported by references from over 20 embryology and other medical textbooks. Other Authorities Agree 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" (test tube babies):  "Conception confers life and makes that life one of a kind." And on the Supreme Court ruling Roe vs Wade:  "To deny a truth about when a human life begins should not be made a basis for legalizing abortion." Professor Eugene Diamond (on Roe vs Wade):  "...either the justices were fed a backwoods biology or they were pretending ignorance about a scientific certainty." Do Abortionists Agree? Most do, because of the evidence.  Dr. Magna Denes, herself an abortion victim, spent two years researching her book "In Necessity and Sorrow:  Life and Death in an Abortion Hospital".  Of her experience experience, she told the "Chicago Daily News" (October 22,1976):  "There wasn't a doctor who at one time or another in the questioning did not say, 'this is murder'"