I no longer see abortion as directly related to sexual freedom or feminism, and I no longer see it strictly as a matter of personal privacy, either. It entails questions about life -- maybe more so at the end of the process than at the beginning, but life nonetheless...

That shift in sentiment is not apparent in polls because they do not measure doubt, only position: for or against. But between one and the other, black or white, is a vast area of gray where up or down, yes or no, fades to questions about circumstance: Why, what month, etc.? Whatever the case, the very basis of the Roe v. Wade decision -- the one that grounds abortion rights in the Constitution -- strikes many people now as faintly ridiculous. Whatever abortion may be, it cannot simply be a matter of privacy....

Conservatives -- and some liberals -- have long argued that the right to an abortion ought to be regulated by states. They have a point. My guess is that the more populous states would legalize it, the smaller ones would not, and most women would be protected. The prospect of some women traveling long distances to secure an abortion does not cheer me -- I'm pro-choice, I repeat -- but it would relieve us all from having to defend a Supreme Court decision whose reasoning has not held up. It seems more fiat than argument.

For liberals, the trick is to untether abortion rights from Roe. The former can stand even if the latter falls. The difficulty of doing this is obvious. Roe has become so encrusted with precedent that not even the White House will say how Harriet Miers would vote on it, even though she is rigorously antiabortion and politically conservative. Still, a bad decision is a bad decision. If the best we can say for it is that the end justifies the means, then we have not only lost the argument -- but a bit of our soul as well.

Margaret does not view her life as unremitting human suffering (although she is angry that I haven't bought her an iPod). She's consumed with more important things, like the performance of the Boston Red Sox in the playoffs and the dance she's going to this weekend. Oh sure, she wishes she could learn faster and had better math skills. So do I. But it doesn't ruin our day, much less our lives. It's the negative social attitudes that cause us to suffer.

Many young women, upon meeting us, have asked whether I had "the test." I interpret the question as a get-home-free card. If I say no, they figure, that means I'm a victim of circumstance, and therefore not implicitly repudiating the decision they may make to abort if they think there are disabilities involved. If yes, then it means I'm a right-wing antiabortion nut whose choices aren't relevant to their lives....

What I don't understand is how we as a society can tacitly write off a whole group of people as having no value. I'd like to think that it's time to put that particular piece of baggage on the table and talk about it, but I'm not optimistic. People want what they want: a perfect baby, a perfect life. To which I say: Good luck. Or maybe, dream on.

And here's one more piece of un-discussable baggage: This question is a small but nonetheless significant part of what's driving the abortion discussion in this country. I have to think that there are many pro-choicers who, while paying obeisance to the rights of people with disabilities, want at the same time to preserve their right to ensure that no one with disabilities will be born into their own families. The abortion debate is not just about a woman's right to choose whether to have a baby; it's also about a woman's right to choose which baby she wants to have.

Scientists experimenting with mice have devised two new ways to derive embryonic stem cells without destroying viable embryos. The work is being hailed for its potential to sidestep some of the ethical controversies that have slowed stem cell research in this country. But each of the new techniques raises ethical issues of its own, and neither is apt to be ready for use in humans for many years.

These and other approaches to deriving stem cells without destroying embryos clearly deserve further research, but they must not be allowed to halt or slow the most proven method of obtaining embryonic stem cells - extracting them from human embryos that are inevitably destroyed in the process....

Some critics consider it morally objectionable to genetically engineer a defective embryo that can't implant. But advocates of this approach believe it can be refined to produce disorganized clumps of tissue that will be deemed biological artifacts, not nascent life.

It would be great if some way could be found to produce embryonic stem cells of high scientific value without raising ethical objections. But until that day comes, it would be foolish to abandon proven techniques just to meet the ethical objections of a minority.

The Supreme Court, in an abortion case of relatively narrow scope, cleared the way Monday for a Missouri prison inmate to terminate her pregnancy.

The high court decision was not a sweeping rendering on the issue of abortion, per se, but rather a holding that Missouri corrections officials must drive the woman to a clinic to have the procedure. It was unclear how soon that would be done.

Late Friday, Justice Clarence Thomas had granted a temporary stay to the state, which prevented the woman from having an abortion on Saturday. But Monday's high court action was unanimous.

Missouri's law forbids spending tax dollars to facilitate an abortion, but the federal judge took the position that the prison system in Missouri was blocking her from exercising that right. Thomas' stay had temporarily blocked the ruling by U.S. District Judge Dean Whipple.

[T]he times may be changing again. Satan might have been sacked, but he did not remain unemployed. The 20th century was the worst arena of coldblooded evil in human history. The social sciences failed to predict, encounter or even grasp this modern, highly technologized evil. Very often, this 20th century evil disguised itself as world reforming, as idealism, as reeducating the masses or "opening their eyes." Totalitarianism was presented as secular redemption for some, at the expense of millions of lives.

Today, having emerged from the evil of totalitarian rule, we have enormous respect for cultures. For diversities. For pluralism. I know some people are willing to kill anyone who is not a pluralist.

Satan, it seems, has been hired for work once again, this time by postmodernism. And this time his job is verging on kitsch: A small, secretive bunch of "shady forces" are always guilty for everything, from poverty and discrimination and war and global warming to Sept. 11 and the tsunami. Ordinary people are always innocent. Minorities are never to blame. Victims are, by definition, morally pure. Did you notice that today, the devil never seems to invade any individual person? We have no Fausts any more.

According to trendy discourse today, evil is a conglomerate. Systems are evil. Governments are bad. Faceless institutions run the world for their own sinister gain. Satan is no longer in the details. Individual men and women cannot be "bad," in the ancient sense of the Book of Job, or of Macbeth, of Iago, of Faust. You and I are always very nice people. The devil is always the establishment. This is, in my view, ethical kitsch.

In truth, there are good people in the world. There are evil people in the world. Evil cannot always be repelled by incantation, by demonstrations, by social analysis or by psychoanalysis. Sometimes, in the last resort, it has to be confronted by force. In my view, the ultimate evil in the world is not war itself, but aggression. Aggression is "the mother of all wars." And sometimes aggression has to be repelled by the force of arms before peace can prevail.

So while most stem cell scientists focus on obtaining stem cells from early embryos, Dr. Daley and Dr. Jaenisch have begun asking if they can get stem cells another way, perhaps by creating aberrant cell clusters that contain stem cells but could never survive more than a week or so. The idea is to produce embryonic cells without the embryos and make nearly everyone happy.

For the last three years, he has been trying to get a consensus on alternative methods of obtaining stem cells, after deliberating on the moral status of the human embryo for a president's council report on cloning.

He personally finds it morally unacceptable to destroy a human embryo, but he also understood the immense promise of stem cells. "I was really torn," he said.

Then he had an idea. What if you got embryonic stem cells in the following way: You do not fertilize an egg. Instead, you start the cloning process but in an altered way so that, he says, no embryo is produced. Ordinarily, with cloning, scientists slip an adult cell into an egg whose genetic material has been removed....Dr. Hurlbut proposed something different. First remove genes from the adult cell that are needed for the full development of an embryo, or silence those genes or alter their pattern of expression. Then start the cloning process by adding that altered cell to an egg.

"What I'm suggesting is creating something that never rises to the level of a living being," he said. "No embryo is ever formed. It's not a human embryo if it doesn't have the potential to develop into the human form." He decided to call it a "biological artifact."

Now we know: President Bush's supporters are prepared to be thoroughly hypocritical when it comes to religion. They'll play religion up or down, whichever helps them most in a political fight.

Shortly after Bush named John Roberts to the Supreme Court, a few Democrats, including Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), suggested that the nominee might reasonably be questioned about the impact of his religious faith on his decisions as a justice....

But now that Harriet Miers, Bush's latest Supreme Court nominee, is in trouble with conservatives, her religious faith and how she lives that faith are becoming central to the case being made for her by the administration and its supporters. Miers has almost no public record. Don't worry, the administration's allies are telling their friends on the right, she's an evangelical Christian.

Some religious conservatives have expressed deep dissatisfaction with the Miers nomination, grumbling that she has never taken public stands on hot-button social issues. But her friends point to Valley View as evidence that she is cut from conservative cloth. They say she's not a "holy roller" who flaunts her religion on her sleeve but she lives her faith as a born-again Christian.

"People in Dallas know she's a conservative," said her friend Ed Kinkeade, a federal district judge. "She's not Elmer Gantry, but she lives what she believes. . . . I'm like, y'all, has George Bush appointed anyone to an appellate court that is a betrayal to conservatives?"...Hecht suggested that it would be difficult to attend Valley View regularly and support gay rights. At the same time, he said, Miers's faith made her more sympathetic to the struggles of others, and her duties as an at-large City Council member transcended her personal views.

"She represented those people, and she wanted to represent the whole city," Hecht said. "It doesn't mean that you approve of their lifestyle."

Ms. Miers, born Roman Catholic, became an evangelical Christian and began identifying more with Republicans than with the Democrats who had long held sway over Texas politics. She joined the missions committee of her church, which is against legalized abortion, and friends and colleagues say she rarely looked back at her past as a Democrat....

To persuade the right to embrace Ms. Miers's selection despite her lack of a clear record on social issues, representatives of the White House put Justice Hecht on at least one conference call with influential social conservative organizers on Monday to talk about her faith and character.

Some evangelical Protestants were heralding the possibility that one of their own would have a seat on the court after decades of complaining that their brand of Christianity met condescension and exclusion from the American establishment.

This case nominally involves two hot-button issues: the right of terminally ill people to end their lives, and the allocation of power between the federal government and states. But the Court of Appeals was right to resolve it more simply, through a careful interpretation of the Controlled Substances Act. Mr. Ashcroft claimed that the law gave him the power to overrule Oregon's assisted suicide policy. But when Congress passed the act, it clearly intended to prohibit ordinary drug abuse, not to set out a federal policy on assisted suicide.

Opponents of assisted suicide have never been able to persuade Congress to outlaw assisted suicide directly. In the absence of a Congressional law, Mr. Ashcroft had no authority to interfere with the decision of Oregon's voters....

The impact of today's case will be felt beyond Oregon. The Bush administration's position has discouraged other states from enacting assisted suicide laws. But the Supreme Court should make clear that Oregon, and all states, have the right to allow terminally ill people to end their lives with a maximum of dignity and a minimum of pain.

Long ago in November of 2004, the people of California voted for a ballot proposition that would spend around $6 billion (including interest charges) on cloning and embryonic stem-cell research. It was a strange campaign, vastly lopsided (pro-cloning spending was around 50 times that of the opposition), aided greatly by the late and somewhat unexpected intervention of Gov. Schwarzenegger, and driven by some of the worst hype in the history of American politics. The people of the nearly bankrupt state were promised cures and also cash returns on their investment--within five years. It was said that before principal repayments fell due, there would be cost savings from the cures that would more than cover the vast costs of the project.

Too good to be true? Well, snakeoil has been sold before. As I pointed out (with Jennifer Lahl) in a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed before the vote, if you make that kind of claim in an IPO rather than a ballot measure, you can go to jail.

Much has happened since. The bond issue is being held up by court challenges. Liberal supporters of the proposition, including Deborah Ortiz, its key booster in the state senate, have woken up to some of the huge problems it raises--not least, the facts that profits from any "cures" that result will not go to the state and that poor women may be used as egg farms by researchers.

Lewis always insisted that his seven Narnia books were not a point-by-point Christian allegory. Much of The Lion, the Witch owes more to English folktales or Norse and classical myth than to the New Testament. The passage of the four Pevensie children through the magic closet into a world laboring under a spell of eternal winter is not Christian, nor are the cruel white witch, talking animals, centaurs, and even a duo of Roman gods who inhabit it. True, the description of the redeeming figure of the lion Aslan as "the Son the Great Emperor-Beyond-the- Sea" is a big hint. But even Aslan's sacrifice on a huge stone table (not a cross; and performed with a stone knife, Aztec-style), and his subsequent miraculous recovery could have been borrowed from any number of world religions.

It is the book's explanation for this key sequence that makes it exclusively Christian....Lewis packed the two huge ideas into a few lines at the brief hinge moment of his plot. But the same electric current than charged The Passion runs through them. What the Lion's filmmakers do with the charming storytelling that surrounds them is--theologically--optional. But if these key ideas are muddled, the film may be a classic, but never a Christian classic. And its revenues, large as they may be, will reflect that.

Ironically, Charles Darwin himself acknowledged that there could be reasonable challenges to his theory of natural selection -- including challenges from religious quarters. According to the sociologist and historian Rodney Stark, when "The Origin of Species" first appeared in 1859, the Bishop of Oxford published a review in which he acknowledged that natural selection was the source of variations *within* species, but rejected Darwin's claim that evolution could account for the appearance of different species in the first place. Darwin read the review with interest, acknowledging in a letter to a friend that "the bishop makes a very telling case against me."

How things have changed. When John Scopes went on trial in Tennessee in 1925, religious fundamentalists fought to keep evolution out of the classroom because it was at odds with a literal reading of the Biblical creation story. Today, Darwinian fundamentalists fight to keep the evidence of intelligent design in the diversity of life on earth out of the classroom, because that would be at odds with a strictly materialist view of the world. Eighty years ago, the thought controllers wanted no Darwin; today's thought controllers want only Darwin. In both cases, the dominant attitude is authoritarian and closed-minded -- the opposite of the liberal spirit of inquiry on which good science depends....

In truth, intelligent design isn't a scientific theory but a restatement of a timeless argument: that the regularity and laws of the natural world imply a higher intelligence -- God, most people would say -- responsible for its design. Intelligent design doesn't argue that evidence of design ends all questions or disproves Darwin. It doesn't make a religious claim. It does say that when such evidence appears, researchers should take it into account, and that the weaknesses in Darwinian theory should be acknowledged as forthrightly as the strengths. That isn't primitivism or Bible-thumping or flying spaghetti. It's science.