M.Ted: Mrzzy said--"Ah, but, M.Ted, it's religion that is keeping us from educating our children!"--That is also not true. Nobody is keeping you from educating your children. If they aren't educated, it is your own fault. Mrr: I have the time, and the education, to spend hours with my kids teaching them what school is supposed to be, and un-teaching what it has taught incorrectly. But it is not the fault of the other parents who have neither the time nor the education necessary if their children get through public school without learning anything. It's the fault of the public school system.

And as a professor teaching science I've had to deal with students who don't "believe in" the fundamental fact of life that our evolution was/is just like that of any other DNA-based life form.

As an aside, to me, a pregnancy is a woman's body part. But to bring it back to the thread, I read recently in a great book called Mu(t)an(t)s, about clergy who wonder how many times to baptize conjoined twins. If the "human" begins at conception, then do all the pregnancies that start out as twins and one fetus absorbs the other involve fratricide? What about outlawing IVF, which makes and discards zygotes? And what about if conjoined twins turn out to happen by fusion rather than fission, which I found incredibly interesting as a possibility, would that matter? If fission, then when does the second one become human, since only one was actually conceived? The can has many, many worms, if you want to go there.

I also read somewhere the point that now that we have the technology, any cell is a "putative" human being, so scratching your ass is killing hundreds of such... *BG*!