“Science is giving the pro-life movement a boost,” Emma Green wrote at the Atlantic last week, and in one very important sense she is right. Scientific discovery in recent decades has indeed bolstered the central and most important tenet of the pro-life movement, namely that the unborn are human beings from the very moment of conception onward, and abortion kills them. Only fools and Planned Parenthood executives are capable of denying this now.

But in a larger sense the pro-life embrace of “science” is a misguided one, chiefly because it takes what is and should be a strictly moral question and turns it into a far more complex and vulnerable one. That’s not to suggest scientific inquiry is somehow hostile to the pro-life position; indeed, it can be entirely useful as a “bridge to [the] moral imagination,” as Notre Dame professor O. Carter Snead told Green. But the principal question of abortion is not scientific — it is moral and ethical.