says advocate of forced childbearing. Quite an accolade for a feminist philosopher.
But Sears out-performs many pro-lifers when he takes a direct shot at UW’s own Shannon Dea, co-president of Planned Parenthood Waterloo Region. Sears’ deluded mind somehow manages to logically justify the argument that, “Stalin, though, had nothing on Shannon Dea.” What did Dea do to deserve this comparison? She must’ve murdered millions right? Of course not. All she said was, “Medical science is irrelevant to the question of when a fetus becomes a human being – that matter is a legal and philosophical one, not a medical one.”
Feminist Philosophers 
Hmm. I’ve heard of Godwin’s Law. Is there a comparable law regarding Stalin?
If I am remembering my years in Catholic school correctly, doesn’t the official Catholic opposition to killing a zygote rely on the idea that ensolument begins at conception? So wouldn’t it follow from the Church’s own doctrine that when “life” begins can only be determined religiously, not scientifically (since I assume the Church admits that there is no scientific evidence that souls even exists, let alone that they enter a fertilized egg at the moment of conception)?
Ergo, I guess according to the advocate of forced childbearing, Stalin’s got nothing on the Catholic Church either.
Also Aquinas himself, who denied the soul entered at conception.
Not too much can be made, I think of the fact that Aquinas didn’t think ensoulment occurred at what we call conception, since the reason seems to be that he had a radically different scientific understanding than we do of what’s going on at conception (at the risk of oversimplifying, we might say that Aquinas effectively thought conception really occurred much later). John Finnis and Stephen Heaney are among the philosophers who have done work on that aspect of Aquinas.
Interestingly, that serves to underscore that as long as there are any empirical propositions involved in a philosophical or theological analysis, the natural sciences are not irrelevant to those philosophical or theological questions, and can even be crucial. For example, science cannot confirm my premise that cows ought never to be slaughtered, but it can aid me in determining whether the animal before me is a cow. Accordingly, my determination of whether I ought to refrain from slaughtering that animal will draw on both metaphysics and science.