That’s lawyer-speak in a lively debate over a bizarre case of implantation gone wrong in a UK clinic. “There really has to be a legal line on when life begins…” snapped the Fox News anchor who sometime during this debate corrected herself from calling an embryo a baby.

So though cases like this are stunning, they are probably logical extensions of the pervasive abortion culture. An invitro fertilization clinic in Wales implanted the wrong woman with the last embryo of another couple. The woman wrongly implanted then had an abortion.

The woman, a 38-year-old hospital worker, told the Mail on Sunday: “In less than 10 seconds our wonderful world was shattered when the senior embryologist stood in front of us and said, ‘I’m very sorry to tell you, but there’s been an accident in the lab. Your embryo has been destroyed’.

“We were both rooted to our seats. We were stunned and trembling. We held each other tightly, and sobbed and sobbed.

“It was like water from a tap. I kept thinking, ‘They’ve killed our baby! Killed our baby!’

At last, naming what the subject of this tragic story is: a baby. Embryo is an early-stage, developing, pre-born human being we usually refer to as a baby.

“Even our worst fears didn’t prepare us for the devastating news that our embryo had actually been placed in another woman and that it had to be taken out and destroyed for ‘medical reasons’,” she said.

“We were shaking with shock and bursting with anger, especially as it was the one thing all IVF patients are told could never happen.”

It emerged that a trainee embryologist had mixed up their embryo – the couple’s last out of nine created using IVF – after taking it from the wrong shelf of the incubator.

I’d say this is chillingly futuristic…..but it has become chillingly current.

About that legal line when life begins, Roe took that out of the hands of the 50 US legislatures in one fell swoop and declared it beyond reach (bad law though it was). But it has been declared medical fact by at least one high court in the US in recent times. And it’s only a matter of time before the law either catches up with the facts of life, or faces another showdown in the highest court.