I’ll ask again -what the heck is a fertilized egg?

You have sperm. You have egg. When the two meet you don’t call it a happy sperm or a fertilized egg. It’s an embryo, a fetus, a baby. That’s it for your available descriptors. Oh wait, there’s one more – a human being.

But GOP frontrunner Newt Gingrich is once again announcing his support of embryonic stem cell research based on when implantation occurs.

TAPPER: Abortion is a big issue here in Iowa among conservative Republican voters and Rick Santorum has said you are inconsistent. The big argument here is that you have supported in the past embryonic stem cell research and you made a comment about how these fertilized eggs, these embryos are not yet “pre-human” because they have not been implanted. This has upset conservatives in this state who worry you don’t see these fertilized eggs as human life. When do you think human life begins?

GINGRICH: Well, I think the question of being implanted is a very big question. My friends who have ideological positions that sound good don’t then follow through the logic of: ‘So how many additional potential lives are they talking about? What are they going to do as a practical matter to make this real?’ I think that if you take a position when a woman has fertilized egg and that’s been successfully implanted that now you’re dealing with life. because otherwise you’re going to open up an extraordinary range of very difficult questions.

By “an extraordinary range of very difficult questions” isn’t Newt playing the same gambit as Barack “above my pay grade” Obama?

Actually, what Newt means is that it’s very difficult to get elected when your opponents are running ads with Michael J. Fox decrying you for not letting him get better. That’s what he means.

Newt’s hitching his support of embryonic stem cell support to the ol’ implantation gambit. So, I’m wondering if you cloned a human being in a lab would you have to wait until the clone was “implanted” in Kindergarten before you considered it a human being worthy of protection.

I never understood the fascination with implantation as some kind of demarcation point between nothingness and life, other than as an argument for contraception not being an abortifacient. I mean, the miracle of life occurs and that miracle is implanted in a woman’s womb and grows. To focus on the implantation rather than the miracle of conception as the true measure of life seems a little beside the point to me.

I don’t see how I could possibly look past this. Newt should remember a candidate isn’t really a nominee until he implants.

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Michael Hirsh says he is done with Newt as well.