The Wrong Question

While it's sort of entertaining to watch Andrew Sullivan needle the Pharisees at the National Review on the chemistry of conception and its relation to pro-life politics, they'd both be better employed discussing why it is that the view of life beginning at conception -- and thus that all abortion is wrong -- is essentially a late 19th century construct, not representative of 1800 years of Church teaching on abortion. While Sully & the NR phone their biology friends to sort out the distinction between zygotes and embryos, consider that the law used to reflect Church teaching that the soul enters the fetus at the quickening -- variously determined to be early in the 2nd trimester or the first time that the mother feels some movement in the womb, and so abortion before that time was permissible. Wasn't it conservatives who used to understand that science and "progress" doesn't necessarily mean more answers?

UPDATE: Via the very welcome return of Sullywatch, we learn of TBogg's hilarious depiction of the duc de Sully--NR science spat.