Internationally known geneticists and biologists have testified that human life begins at conception. In 1981 (April 23-24) a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee held hearings on the very question: When does human life begin?

The following doctors testified:

DR. HYMIE GORDON, Chairman of the Department of Genetics at the Mayo Clinic, said: “By all the criteria of modern molecular biology, life is present from the moment of conception.”

DR. MCCARTHY DE MERE, a medical doctor and law professor at the University of Tennessee, testified: “The exact moment of the beginning of personhood and of the human body is at the moment of conception.”

DR. JEROME LEJEUNE, “The Father of Modern Genetics,” said: “Each of us has a very precise starting moment, which is the time at which the whole necessary and sufficient genetic information is gathered inside one cell, the fertilized egg, and this is the moment of fertilization. There is not the slightest doubt about that, and we know that this information is written on a kind of ribbon we call the DNA.” The late Dr. Jerome Lejeune discovered the genetic cause of Down Syndrome. He received the Kennedy Prize for the discovery, as well as the Memorial Allen Award Medal, the world’s highest award for work in the field of genetics.