mr. speaker , i thank the majority leader for yielding .  mr. speaker , i rise this evening in opposition , strong opposition , to h.r. 810 , not as a physician , not as an obstetrician-gynecologist , but as a pro-life catholic who firmly believes in the sanctity of life .  i have sat here for almost 3 hours listening to every word of the debate as part of my job as a member of the rebuttal team , and here is my legal pad of notes and rebuts .  most of those rebuts are against people on my side of the aisle , because this issue is clearly a bipartisan issue .  you have members , republicans and democrats , who are for the bill , indeed the authors , and you have republicans and democrats who are in opposition to the bill .  so i have got plenty of rebuttals that i could make , but very briefly , i will just mention one or two .  one of the gentlemen on my side of the aisle said that we need the federal government , we need the federal government involved in embryonic stem cell research and the funding of that to provide ethical guidelines to the states .  you remember that comment , maybe an hour or so ago ?  well , if the federal government is involved in a program where taxpayer dollars are spent to destroy human life , what ethical advice can they give to my state of georgia , i ask ?  i think none .  you see , i firmly believe in the sanctity of life , and i believe that life does begin at conception , and these embryos are definitely living human beings .  the gentleman just said a few minutes ago that `` i ca n't imagine that a 14-week blastocyst has the same value as a human being. '' indeed , it does .  mr. speaker , i would ask my colleagues to look at these charts and what we know with these so-called frozen throwaway embryos that nobody wants .  well , there are hundreds today of these snowflake children , and there will be many more when people realize this is available to them .  yes , it starts as an embryo , just a few cells , and then a blastocyst .  but then here is a 20-week ultrasound with a beating heart and brain and limbs and moving , and then here is the final result .  let me just say in conclusion , the gentleman from new jersey talked about his development , his growth and development , and going backwards in his life .  he stood in this well and said , `` i am an adult man today .  but yesterday i was a teenager , and before that i was a toddler. '' but he did not go the opposite direction and say `` in 20 years i will be a senior citizen , and after that i may be in a nursing home and i may have alzheimer 's .  i may be a vegetable. '' you would not want to destroy those lives , any more than the embryos at the beginning of life .  