I am so excited, I mean, I was just thinking, this is a gift, this is a gift, this is a gift that we are all here together, and to be here for the glory of God, and to be here to just communicate together, to share the journeys that we have been on, and to share how God is walking with us every step of the way.

And so I'm going to, I have a lot to share with you about the journey that I have been on, and Tajine asked me to just give a little bit about where I've been, and how I got to where I am, and I show this, one, because I love the beach, and I reside in Wisconsin, and if you know Wisconsin, there aren't many beaches in Wisconsin, so I, whatever moment I can, I try to get to a beach, and you know, the reason I put this up in the Spike Awards for Philippians, being confident in this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.

I grew up in a Christian home, with Christian parents, Godly parents, my mother reminded me of this first, when I was going through a difficult time, I loved the church growing up, but I walked away from the church during my undergraduate and college years, which I think many people do, but it was honestly the worst thing I could have done at that time, but when I was done, and I realized my mistake, my mother reminded me of this first, and said, "God has got you, he's got a hold on you, and he's going to complete his work," and so this is just a good reminder for all of us, just what Mark had told us, that whatever you're facing, God's got this, and if you don't believe this, you're going to burn.

And as I mentioned, I grew up in a small town in Wisconsin, in a Christian home, Christian parents, went to a parochial school, and I just loved the church from a very early age, I loved scripture, I even thought at the time I wanted to be a pastor, but it just, that family was a God-planned, especially where we are now, but I loved the church, and I loved Genesis, learning about how God created every single one of us, and how we were made in his image, in his likeness, and then he reminded Noah of that, when he set forth his new covenant, written, "If God has God made man," and I just always was fascinated with how God created us as humans in his likeness, it is profound, it is profound how then Jesus came in human form, in the form of a baby, and it's just, it's remarkable when you think about it, and I also loved science as a child, and I, you know, I loved nature, and I loved studying God's creation, but I was like this little girl, I was trying so hard to look through that microscope and see God's creation even in more detail, you know, because it's beautiful as it is, but I wanted to understand it, and of course, the things that came with the microscope kit that I had when I was eight years old, which is, you know, you can barely see anything with it, you know, like the wings of the bee, and the, you know, the feathers that they provided in the kit, and I was like, ah, this is just too boring, I want to know what's going on inside us, how God created us as human beings, so much to my parents' chagrin, I actually would poke my finger, and take the blood and put it onto the microscope, little did I know that this was just not a high enough power microscope to be able to see anything, but it just, it's a good reminder to me of just how I've always been, God has placed it on my heart, just this interest and desire to just really dive deep into how he has created us to be fearfully and wonderfully made, and so I knew I would be involved into the sciences, and so I, you know, so I proceeded to go, oh, oh yeah, can you hear me okay?

Yes, oh, that's so much better, could you hear anything that I said before this? Okay, good, so I proceeded to go and get my education, I received a PhD in bio, I received an undergraduate degree in biochemistry, and then PhD in biochemistry, and then I decided to do a postdoc in molecular and cell biology at Harvard Medical School, and it was an amazing experience, I learned so much, and then I came back to Wisconsin, where I joined the faculty at the Medical College of Wisconsin and Children's Hospital, and the goal was really to understand at the most molecular and cell level how we were created, and I was really fascinated with heart development, and so my lab was focused for about, you know, 20 years, my career, over 20 years, my career has really been focused on understanding disease, so I kind of toggled back and forth between how do you detect disease, so in the field of pathology, and then how do you try to fix it in surgery, so I kind of toggled back and forth between pediatric surgery and pathology in my training, and I was so fascinated with how God had designed the heart, and how it was one of the first organs to develop so early on, just 18 days after fertilization, the heart just started to form, and it was that very precise and intricate need for DNA being expressed at the right time, at the exact place, so that those cells could do exactly what they were supposed to do at the right time, and if that didn't happen, then some kids would develop congenital heart disease, so that was really what we were focused on, and not only trying to understand the disease, but then I directed a lab to try to understand, well, how can we even detect the, at the molecular level, at the DNA level, how can we detect the cause of the disease, so then these parents knew what was going on, and then the surgeons knew how to fix it.

But then what happened while I was, you know, so engrossed in my studies, God blessed me with an amazing husband, and we tried to have children of our own, and suddenly I was faced with having a problem physically, we were suffering with infertility, and not knowing how to fix it, and we were told at this one appointment that we had a less than 2% chance of getting pregnant, we were just beside ourselves, we were distraught, and we headed down this road, this journey, that I know, that was full of fear, like, oh my gosh, how, you know, this was our plan, to have all these children, and now it's not happening, and there was so much pain on this journey, in a very short period, probably about five years, there was a journey of immense pain, because we were struggling with trying to get pregnant, and it wasn't happening, and we prayed, and we prayed, and we did whatever the doctor told us to do, and then we suffered miscarriages, and then I prayed some more, and God, I felt like Hannah, he answered our prayer, and we were blessed with a child, named Jonah, who's 10 now, just such a blessing from above, but through that experience of incredible pain through the losses, and joy in seeing my son, inside the womb, and then outside the womb, the same human being, it was just, it was incredible, but then we suffered another miscarriage after that, and so, it was like this roller coaster, of up and down, up and down, and I just was searching for answers, like, why would God allow this?

And he just placed on my heart, Psalm 139, so thank you, I can't imagine a more beautiful introduction to my talk, and I'm going to just repeat these words, for you created my inmost being, you knit me together in my mother's womb, I praise you, because I am fearfully and wonderfully made, your works are wonderful, I know that full well, my frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body, all the days ordained for me, were written in your book, before one of them came to be, and it was like the Holy Spirit just placed on my heart, I am creating, these are my children, I am creating them, and I know the moment when they are created, and I am the mass, I am hand crafting each child, and just like it says, I ordained, all the days are ordained, and he decides, he decides when it's time for them to come home.

And it was just such a wonderful comfort, but then at the same time, while I felt like, you know, God had really been holding me and walking me through, you know, my husband and I through these very difficult experiences, at the same time, I was also looking around and seeing what was happening in our institution.

And I was seeing how so many, you know, I had just, I felt like, God had opened my eyes to how wonderful his creation was of every human person, and how he, everyone is so unique and creative for a purpose, and then I saw, almost on a daily basis, how so many around me in the world were not seeing that, and these little innocent ones were being destroyed, and they were being neglected, and they were even being used for research.

And God convicted me. He said, stop using the gifts I have given you for myself, and my own selfish desires, and now to use them for his glory and his kingdom. I had to lay everything down at his feet, including the desire for more children. And that's a whole other story for another day.

And so I started to speak up when I saw things happening and the institution doing things with much fear and trembling, I will say, and when godly friends, when I was able, these are some of my friends here were testifying here in Wisconsin, that was one of the first things we did, and then God had plans for me to testify in many different states and even go to Washington, D.C.

and testify in front of Congress. But it came to a point where I was doing this and trying to do my job where God called me to step down from my academic position, and I said, really, God? You know, this was the goal, and then he reminded me, no, that was your plan.

This is my plan. I want you to step down, and I took a year off. People thought I was crazy. I mean, when I told my chair that I was just, I was taking, I needed to step down, and I was going to, he said, well, what are you going to do?

I'm like, well, I'm actually not sure, I'm going to let God tell me, but that year was a gift from God because I was able to really dive deep into scripture and really work on my relationship with him and spend time with my son and just really, and I knew he was calling me to, he was calling me to something different.

And he reminded me of this from 2 Timothy, that whatever lie ahead, that for God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love, and of self-discipline. That power that is inside of us is that same power that rose Jesus from the dead.

Jesus is alive. He is with us, and whenever we are facing struggles, he, his Holy Spirit is there to be our helper through this, and that power is perfected in weakness. And the weapons that we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds, and I feel like I'm reminded of this, and God places this on my heart.

We demolish arguments and every pretense that sets itself up against the knowledge of God. God has created these little ones. He is the creator. These are his children, and that's the message that we tell. And so God has really opened doors. I thought what was, you know, when God put it on my heart that he was changing my career and he had new plans for me, door, he opened this door to the Charlotte Lozier Institute, which is a nonprofit organization that is located in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C.

I work remotely from Wisconsin. It's such a blessing to be able to work remotely, and I just travel as needed. But we, our goal is, we are not a Christian organization, but we are Christians, and we, our goal is to use, to promote a deeper public understanding of the value of every human life from the moment of conception until natural death.

And so we use science and statistics to help people understand, and this, and for the glory of God. And so, you know, human life begins at conception. This is a scientific fact. But we also know that this science-confirmed scripture in Jeremiah, "Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you." This I'm showing you here is just a beautiful image of the beginning steps of conception before the sperm and the egg fuse.

And centuries of science, I'm going to just give a little bit of history here. Centuries of scientific discovery and technological advancement have provided indisputable proof that from the moment of conception, when the sperm fertilizes the egg, there is a creation of a new, totally distinct, integrated organism, a human being, a person, biologically distinct from any other form on this planet.

And the dynamics of fertilization are well established. I'm showing you here what's called the Carnegie Stages of Human Development. These were first developed in, these were first established in 1942, have since been expanded. But they remain the standard used by all biologists to describe the first embryonic period of human life, which is going to be the first, actually, eight weeks since fertilization, or 10 weeks gestation.

Because just a reminder that there's two different ages that you can, that you can explain pregnancy. I'm going to be going from gestation, just because that's what most women hear when they go to the OB. But just that earliest embryo there starts off as a zygote, a one cell.

And that's going to grow to nearly 1 billion cells by the end of the 10th embryonic week, the stage 23. And will become a fully then developed adult, like us, containing 30 to 40 trillion cells. And what's amazing is by this 10th week, you can already see that that little one already has fingers and toes.

What's amazing is that God has designed this child that, that by this stage, that baby already has 90% of its body structures. The adult is predicted to have 4,500 body structures. By this stage, they already have 4,000 of those body structures in place. It's remarkable. So what kind of cell has been produced at the sperm-egg fusion?

Right there, that first one, which is actually the very first stage of the Carnegie stage. Is it a new human being, or is it simply a human cell? I'm not going to get into the nitty gritty details of fertilization. I'm going to encourage you, if you're interested, to look at this paper by Maureen Condick.

She's a professor at the University of Utah, but she has dove deep into this of when human life begins. And she provides the scientific evidence, if you're interested. And she identifies 26 key events that start with fertilization through the first week, and documents every single stage. It's fascinating. But I just want to read what she has from this paper, that it is clear that the zygote, or one-cell human embryo, forms immediately upon sperm-egg fusion.

The embryo does not function as a mere human cell or group of human cells. It functioned as an organism, a complete human being, at an immature stage of development. So it's basically just-- it's no different that zygote is just another name for the child, right? So you have-- we call it an infant, a toddler, a teenager.

The zygote is just the earliest stage of the human being. And I also want to point out this paper by O'Reilly and Mueller, where they say prenatal age begins at fertilization, postnatal age at birth. So further confirmation. And then even, if you want even more evidence, scientific consensus on when a human's life begins.

So this was a PhD student. His thesis was on, what do people-- what do other people say about this? So he surveyed about 5,500 biologists at over 1,000 institutions in 86 countries. Over 95% of them were PhDs, and over half of them are non-religious. And the majority of them say, yes, human life begins at conception.

And so I just think it's remarkable that not only do we see that in scripture, do we read in scripture, but science confirms that. And we're now going to, like-- I want to walk you through this journey of what happens from fertilization, because it's fascinating. And when I was in my mother's womb, this is what my mother saw.

I mean, you can barely pick out the ultrasound scan. You barely pick out the head of the baby from the 1970s. So I think God has graced us with the technology of ultrasound. And that just within the last 50 years, there have been remarkable improvements to be able to see what is actually happening to these babies inside the womb.

Because now you can see modern ultrasound, these babies, you can see them with absolute clarity. Barely you could pick out the head with the black and white grainy dots. Now you can see the facial features. You can see every facet of that baby. And that's not even to mention the behaviors.

A baby at this stage is going to be sucking his or her thumb and is already going to have a preference for whether they're right or left handed. It's remarkable. I mean, and there's studies that have shown that, that whether they use their right or left hand, that then follows what happens after birth.

And so we thought it was so important that, you know, God has provided so much information through ultrasound and through science of what's happening, you know, his beautiful, it's like a window into the womb. And so he, you know, to show us how wonderful his creation is of these little ones.

But we know that a lot of these papers and science are behind firewalls. And it's hard for people to get access to them and everybody is really busy. And so we really wanted to, we were fascinated by it. And we wanted to make, we really felt called to bring this, I know Ty Dinea has used this word accessible.

And I think that's so important, because we wanted to make this accessible to people and to show them the beauty of God's human creation inside the womb. Because modern medicine tells us more than ever before about how we are wonderfully made by our creator. So I'm going to next I'm going to show you a video that we made that's on our website.

And I'm going to put the development down to one minute. And it's just beautiful. It's beautiful how God's hands shaped and made all of us. I mean, we so we use that medical artwork that is accurate based on the most up to date information that we have to just show that and we want to share this journey with you this voyage that God has a sign and I want to talk about, you know, I want to talk about how we are creative for a purpose how and how God's awesome creative and awesome design is that we are each unique and I'm reminded of Ephesians 2 10 for we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.

We are all created for a purpose and every human being is created with a purpose has intrinsic value and worth and God designed each person to be unique and magnificent from the moment of conception everything that defines us in our uniqueness. I mean, we can get into like how the environment affects things, but we know that our uniqueness and our genome is present right from the moment of conception and it is nothing short of a miracle and what's amazing is that there is enough genetic variation that again no two humans are going to be the same or ever will be even in the case of twins.

So how can that be why I want to go back to we knew that DNA was important in defining our uniqueness as human beings. But what science can you know, it's science again confirms what the Holy Spirit revealed to King David 3000 years ago when he wrote Psalm 139 we are literally knit together in our mother's room because DNA is when it was the destruction was discovered in 1953.

It was described as actually two ribbons of genetic material woven together. It's just like that tapestry that Mark was talking about and when Watson and Crick who discovered this in their in their best-selling book later Watson later claim that Rick Crick announced that discovery by walking into the nearby Eagle Pub and blurting out we have found the secret of life.

They knew they knew that discovering the structure of DNA was key to understanding the remarkable uniqueness of each one of us. Well, why is that? Well, because DNA is in some respects like the blueprint of life. Every living thing has its own unique genetic information or DNA code based on the same four nucleotides A C G and T and it's all contained within each of our cells compacted into the nucleus of every cell and the cell is going to be like the it's like a little machine kind of but it basically is going to be the function of how we are going to function and how everything is going to develop inside our body.

And so although only you know one generated human genome sequence is shown for the purpose of the application in fact reality we have two genome sequences right one from mom and one from dad. And they estimate that just one of the sequences is going to be about three billion nucleotides each copy.

So we have each person has six billion nucleotides. It's amazing. And if all that so I'm not a math person but there are really amazing math people like you all that have determined that if the DNA in the adult human body is unraveled like a string that it would exceed sixty three billion miles in length which is comparable to three hundred and forty round trips from the earth to the sun and back.

And when estimating the number of different types of people that can be created it has been determined that any male and female can produce over eight million offspring that are each genetically unique. Nobody's going to be having I don't think eight million offspring but it just shows that the probability of there being two identical children from any two parents in the population is six point two billion to one.

So that just shows how God has just engineered this with such preciseness that we are all so unique from the very down to the very DNA that is in each one of us and is in ourselves. So the human genome is again packaged as I mentioned into each of these cells and it's we need to have two chromosomes again one from mom one from dad I'm showing you here what's called a karyotype so these are actually the chromosomes and you can see that the chromosomes we have twenty three chromosomes twenty two of them labeled one two twenty two and then our sex chromosomes x or y if you have an x y you're going to be a male if you have x x you're going to be a female and this is going to be determined from the moment of conception whether you are male or female.

And you can see here just just all of these chromosomes contain all of the DNA that is in our bodies that are complete genome for life. And what happens is that this DNA is packaged in the cell very tightly but it's going to be unraveled at just the right time.

This is where the precise nature of God really really shows that it's going to be unraveled at just the right time to activate these genes that are kind of like that are going to then give rise to proteins that are going to perform the many cellular functions and are going to define then who we are as human beings and and you're going to produce the more cells and more tissues and organs and be the human being that we are.

But it's just it's it's fascinating that there that this dogma of DNA going from DNA to RNA and then to protein is what defines so much of how we are so unique. And what's amazing is that you think OK well the genome is estimated to contain about twenty to twenty five thousand genes you say OK well that's that's actually that's kind of a lot of genes but but then you think OK but what's amazing and what I'm showing you here is that the DNA is on the top so you can see the DNA is there's what's called exons and then those exons are kind of like the so if you look at it like a recipe OK so that those are going to be the you have a cookbook is the DNA and then the recipes are going to tell you like how to bake a cake right.

Well this is like a recipe for how to make proteins that are going to be again they're going to tell the cells what to do. But those those coding regions like the recipe part can be shuffled around and you can with one gene in some cases you can make up to 100 different proteins just from one gene.

And so it's just this starts to show just how we dive deeper and deeper into more variability. And this is just also showing a structure of protein and how again it's kind of like a ribbons like together and just beautiful intricacy. And so what's in what's interesting is that people are so fascinated with understanding well what is the sequence of the genome for every single human being.

Because in order to do that we can understand what kind of what does make us more unique and how are we different from each other. And so that's been a big push from the Human Genome Project is to actually determine the sequence of all six billion nucleotides and what's the order of that.

And now then in 2022 there was actually gaps in that though with the first draft in 2001. But then in 2022 they tried to fill in some of those gaps. And now the new human pan genome is going to try to look at more different races to really get a good feel for what type of what is the sequence.

Because the more you understand about the sequence the more you can hopefully understand about a how are we uniquely made but also how can we maybe identify disease. And so but what they're finding so far with the information that we have is that human beings are about ninety nine point six percent identical or point four percent different from another person.

So just that point four percent difference. I mean that's that's why we look different. That's why we act different. That's why we you know we just it's just different hair color different eye color different diseases. It's just different functions. It's just it's remarkable but it all in many respects comes down to point four percent difference when it comes down to the genome.

I'm just going to very briefly give you a molecular 101 science lesson about what are some of those differences. But you're going to hear something called like single nucleotide variants. So throughout the genome there are sprinkled some variants. And so what's showing you here is that they can just at one spot in the genome.

Let's say person one will have a C on one strand and a T on the other. But person two will have a C on one strand and a C on the other and person three will have a T and a T. So you can see how there's this genetic variability that is based in just at the very subtle and most of these are non-disease for me but they can have dramatic effects of who we are as a person and even like how we respond to different medications and such.

There's large structural variations in which you can you actually can see that when you look at the chromosomes that parts of the chromosome will actually be deleted or they will be duplicated or they will invert from with each other. You will have insertions or even translocations where one part of the chromosome from like chromosome four will go on to chromosome 20 and then vice versa.

And so it's just it's really fascinating. I also want to show you that you can have smaller like what's called duplication. So in this case people have been looking really hard at this gene called Notch 2NL. It's like alphabet soup when you look at all these genes and what they name them.

But this one they're particularly interested in because it is unique to humans. And this one has been specifically been shown to play in a critical role in brain development and they're finding that in people that have more copies of this gene they have bigger brains and if they have less copies of this gene they have smaller brains.

And this can actually be some causation for some of the disorders we see with brain microcephaly or macrocephaly. So it's really quite fascinating. So now we're going to kind of back up and I just I want to just pause and say all of this I mean that was just a snapshot of the genetic diversity that we have.

But all of that is present at the moment of fertilization. Within 40 hours of fertilization then I'm showing you here so right this is a picture again of within the first week of fertilization that the cells are going to instantly start to divide. All the genetic information is in place.

We are already unique. We are human living human being from the moment of conception. But now we're going to start to divide our cells and grow all the tissues and organs. And so the division starts immediately. So you go from two cells to four cells and this happens rapidly the doubling the number of total cells.

And I think I want to go back to Psalm 139 where we are made in the secret place. Only God knows at exactly the moment when that conception takes place. If it happens inside the womb only God is the only one that knows. And so these are images of real embryos showing what it looks what the zygote that single cell looks like on day one.

And that again that single cell zygote is going to become a 30 trillion cell adult. On day two again that division occurs. The cells just keep dividing over and over. On day five the human being is called a blastocyst. It's just another stage of development. And at that stage that's when it's ready to implant into the mother's womb.

And I think what's fascinating for those of you that might be interested in in vitro fertilization and what happens at day five at this stage this happens outside of the womb for in vitro fertilization and it's at this stage then it will the embryo will be transferred back into the mother to see and hopefully implantation will occur.

If there's any doubt that these human beings at day five are not a real human living human being I encourage you to look at this page. It's called nightlight.org. They are involved in embryo adoption or if you've heard of snowflake babies. And these are babies that were all the result of embryo adoption after in vitro fertilization.

And these embryos were adopted out and they have names. They have faces now. But before that when they were adopted they just had numbers. So this was embryo number 41. Now she's Ella. And it's just it's a remarkable reminding that we are human beings from the moment of conception and even at that five day stage just how remarkable seeing the human beings.

And so at that stage then at the five day stage then that's when implantation is going to occur. And so I'm showing you here medical artwork showing that blastocyst in the mother's uterus and then it's six days after fertilization the early embryo will begin to implant in the uterus and the outer cells in the blastocyst have what's called a special sticky molecules that will help the blastocyst bind to the wall of the uterus.

And what's fascinating is that the embryo is now in this permanent home in his mother and will stay there until it's ready for birth. So then week five now this is now that implantation has occurred now we have nutrition that's coming from the mother. The inner cells of the embryo are going to now form three layers of tissue.

So now we start to see the body plan forming. So the top layer is going to be the skin the nervous system and the eyes and the ears the middle layer is going to contribute to the muscles the bones the kidneys and the reproductive system and the inner layer contributes to the baby's lungs and intestine just to name a few.

So it's just it's amazing that just so soon after the embryo is developed that we already see the body plan start to occur. And just six weeks after the baby the baby is developing we're going to have the first heartbeat whoops let me go back. And so this is I have to wait for it I have to be patient.

There we go. So here you are seeing by photoscopy a real beating heart of a baby in the six week gestation which is again four weeks post fertilization so the baby itself is really only four weeks of age. But it's just fascinating. It's you can see the blood is pumping in the heart at just this early stage.

And this again is the first organ to form and function in the heart. It's a vital source of circulation and nutrients and oxygen carrying blood and especially once the nutritional requirements the embryo can no longer be met by diffusion of the placenta alone that's why we need the heart to form.

So these are just some interesting facts about heart development. You're going to see at the on the far left that's the heart tube. That's where the early primitive heart is going to start to beat. It beats just 22 days after fertilization that again is in the sixth week and not only is it beating it's beating rhythmically at 110 beats per minute by the end of that week.

Just a couple weeks later it's going to be at 159 beats per minute. By the ninth week it's going to be twice the heart rate of the mother's at 170 beats per minute. By the end of the sixth week it will have already beat 1 million times and it just keeps going on and on from there.

The same heart will beat 54 million times before birth and over 3.2 million times into adulthood and what's important is that the heart rate is so important at this stage for any of you who have been pregnant or have seen an ultrasound you know that the heartbeat is the sign of life and when they they look for the physician looks for the heartbeat and they because they know that if they see a heartbeat that that baby has a high chance of surviving to childbirth as high as 98% in some cases.

And so I started heart valve development when I was in Boston and so I find it just fascinating that these heart valves, you're seeing here a picture on the right of an adult heart valve, these leaflets are like they are so thin they're like these little like paper thin even thinner than paper they're so delicate and they open and close to ensure that the blood is pumping in the right direction and even at this early stage at six weeks there are already these primitive heart valves that are in place that prevent the backflow of the blood through the heart tube and assist in the forward propulsion of the blood through this baby to make sure that the blood is pumping and the nutrients are getting to the baby so that the rest of the organs can now start to develop.

And one of the next organs that is very important and is going to develop is the brain and so we see here the different stages of brain development throughout human development and what's amazing is that the brain is going to undergo complex and lifelong changes and so some of the most important stages of brain maturation occur during development, early childhood and adolescence and actually it's not until about age 25 when our brain is fully developed and fully functional.

So it kind of explains some things you know maybe so but it's just it's an important fact and I want to you know a lot of times with the heart too people will say well that's not a real heart at six weeks because it's not four chambers yet but I remind you that life is a continuum right we are always in some form of development we are either developing function or honestly losing function so it's it's just it's fascinating that that God has engineered it that we are continually continually developing and our systems are maturing it's incredible.

And so I'm going to start kind of see how we're doing on time okay so I'm going to start moving through and showing you some this is a real image this is a real picture of baby inside the womb these were images that were very generously provided by the Center for Bioethical Reform Greg Cunningham's group and it's just remarkable to see the little one here as early as week nine brain as we showed earlier brain activity is is really is really exploding at this point so we can see that the embryo starts to move and respond to touch the embryo's heart as we said now at this stage the heart started beating at six weeks but now by nine weeks now all four chambers are in place and we see that there's already pockets of cells that resemble taste buds on the on the tongue the eyelids are already formed the knees and elbows appear the toes start to form and the tissue between the fingers become thin and so you can notice how the knees and elbows are forming and the neurons and I think it's it's just it's remarkable we know that brain activity has actually has already been recorded at this stage it's just it's remarkable and there's even ultrasound recordings has also shown that the embryo can actually hiccup at this stage so now by 10 weeks and if you remember back to those Carnegie stages that I showed you this is the stage where we see that they have 90% now of their structures the fingers and the toes and the digestive system are fully in place the toes can actually wiggle this is where the embryo can show preference for the right or left hand they've already they can detect electrical activity of the heart that resembles that of a newborn the embryo can actually bring can bend his elbows and bring his hands together and can also roll over with the amniotic sac squint grasp and point his toes and when the embryo touches his face he will frequently move his head away and so the the embryo can even make intermittent breathing motions which is just remarkable by week 11 we can see that this at this point the embryonic period is done and the the baby is called a fetus we can see external genitalia start developing tooth buds are developing more complex behaviors are seen such as thumb sucking swallowing and stretching and now there's an explosive growth of the brain growing over 250 neurons per minute and once the preborn baby starts moving he doesn't sit still so reachers researchers have actually quantified fetal movements and they found that the fetus does not stay still for more than 13 minutes at a time and by 11 weeks the nerve receptors inside the fetal skin can sense light touch so if anything lightly tickles the sole of the fetus's foot the fetus will bend his knee to withdraw his foot and may even curl his toes so by week 12 we see a dramatic growth spurt you can tell I don't know if you've been monitoring you know watching the centimeters on the bottom but I think it was only a couple a few centimeters and now we're up to you know six centimeters from crown to rump and and fingerprints and fingernails are developing I mean the fingernails will start to grow and the fingerprints have already started to form and it's remarkable just how even subtle you know the fingerprints are going to start to form and it's going to be even just that environment within the womb that is going to play a direct role into what type of fingerprints that child develops and again that by 12 weeks the fetus will respond to light touch now on the face the palms of the hands it's just remarkable we've actually put together 12 amazing facts at 12 weeks I'll just talk about a couple of these but you can go to our website and see them but all major organs have formed by now the four chambered heart is pumping over six quarts of blood per day each finger can move separately the fetus has a face the teeth are developing and the brain connections that are formed at 12 weeks will survive into adulthood so it's just it's remarkable by 15 weeks this is the the big stage when we start to see pain and stress response so it honestly if you go back this is fascinating literature there was a time when they thought that that newborns didn't feel pain I mean which is just and then there was then the literature started saying well no they they don't feel pain until after 24 weeks and and Dr.

Stuart Dubochard was one of the world's leading neuroscientists he actually published a major study saying that he's like no pain doesn't start until after 24 weeks but then now with all the evidence you know when are the receptors actually forming on these children when and now with ultrasound we can actually see them respond to pain the weight of the new scientific scientific evidence is so strong that he changed his view and he published a recent report that says no you know what unborn babies I was wrong they can experience pain by 15 weeks and possibly as early as 12 weeks and what they thought was that the cerebral cortex was not needed to feel pain and that's not the case evidence is showing that it actually a functioning cerebral cortex is not required to feel pain and so what's even more and I'll talk about this a little bit later in my talk but actually they do fetal surgery now and they use anesthesia specifically for the baby because they know that the baby can feel pain and this is just an image of a baby that's sitting comfortably inside the womb about ready to have fetal surgery to correct a defect so you can see sitting comfortably and then you're gonna see the response once they received an injection in their thigh of anesthesia and so you it's just remarkable just you know not only do we know it scientifically at the receptor level we can see it in their face they are feeling pain and this is for anesthesia this is to give them the anesthesia so that they won't feel the pain so you can see just the cutting 40 ultrasound images and how much more information we have now about these little ones by about this stage you know about you know 16 weeks we start to see all the sensory systems and sensations are in place touch taste hearing vision smell and pain I'm not going to go into all these details I encourage you to go to a website to get more but it's just when you see how God and just the preciseness like all of this is happening just at the right time in the right place by weeks 19 and 20 we can see that the baby is starting to actually practice activities that he will do outside the womb such as breathing and crying and the rooting reflex vocal cords are developing in a pattern that they will see in crying after birth it's just it's remarkable weeks 21 to 22 again you know the inner ear has developed they can start to hear they can start to hear their mother's voice just a couple weeks later it's just respond to taste there's actually studies that have shown that if the mother eats a cookie versus something bitter the baby will drink more of the amniotic fluid because they already can strongly taste and they know what they like my son to this day now I know why he I felt kicking every time I ate a banana because this day he hates but to this day he hates bananas oh I thought bananas were good for you now I know he actually was very unhappy every time I ate one and so that you know I'm again I'm really there's a lot going on six seventh eight nine months we see again response to sound in light there's an amazing photography of where you can see the the baby actually putting a hand kind of towards the the mother's uterus at the end of uterus in response to light sleep patterns brain growth and lung maturation and of course then labor and delivery and new beginnings will happen about nine months but I want to just back up because we do have a little bit of time I want to talk about just the technology that God has graced us with in saving these tiny babies because we know that you know in many cases women carry babies for nine months and then deliver but we know that life doesn't always happen as we planned it and I think through this incredible gift of technology God has reminded us the humanity of these little ones inside the womb as and and just I'm going to walk you through some of the amazing things that are happening to remind us of just how how beautiful these babies are so there have been so much technology happening within the last three decades to not only to save extremely premature babies so for various reasons some babies might be might women might go into labor early and so medical advances have now made it possible to save these extremely premature early babies at early and earlier stages so once you know about 50 years ago viability was about maybe 24 weeks you could see that they were born these babies could survive now that clock just it's an arbitrary point of like now because of when viability is because now we're seeing because of modern science that some of these babies as early as 21 weeks gestation that's just about a little over halfway through gestation are surviving so this this little boy is Curtis Means he was born in July 2020 he was born at 21 weeks in one day 132 days premature and he is on record as he broke the Guinness World Record and so it's just remarkable just how what can be done to save these and because of that hospitals many American hospitals now have started offering the resuscitation and the active care for infants born at 22 weeks I now want to just talk about whoops not only can you save babies outside the womb but as I mentioned earlier with fetal surgery just the technology to save babies now inside the womb so what you we wrote a paper on this if you're interested but what you're seeing here and it's just it's his name is Samuel Armis on the left that's a famous picture it's called the hand of hope one of the earlier earlier reports of which they actually did surgery to repair a defect inside the woman you can see his little hand there they literally bring the uterus out and you can see the baby's hand because he crafts he he he grasped the surgeon's hand in process and they they had a photographer there to take the picture it was remarkable and here's a picture another fetal surgery in which you can see the little foot right there and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia reminds us because they do many of these surgeries that the average size of the organs operated on during fetal surgery is is about a half an inch so it's just remarkable how they do these and to see the amount of growth in in in surgery in 1997 so it's chopped us so many of these surgeries but in 1997 that was it was new and so they have a fetal family union to get together and celebrate that these babies survived the surgery inside the womb and I want to point out too that this surgery can happen as early as 15 weeks so it's just remarkable but you can see how much it's grown I mean they had just like a handful and they were in the lobby but now in 2022 just last year they now had to go to the zoo to celebrate the thousands of babies that have been that have been saved it's remarkable and one of the main surgeries that are done you can hear about this in the news all the time is in utero treatment for spina bifida and so this is when that very early stage when the neural tube is forming that will give rise to the brain and the and the spinal cord it doesn't close properly the way it should and so it actually it's actually exposed to the to the to the amniotic fluid and they need to close that and because it can lead to significant health issues for the child and can even be fatal so what they found is that you can actually go in and you can repair this wound and it leads to significant improvements for these children not only do they survive but they actually have a much better quality of life and they can walk and actually this study was so powerful because it actually showed that that they actually stopped the study early because they said well wait this is this is amazing how let's just stop the study and offer this to all babies they also do laser therapy for twin to twin transfusion syndrome so this is where it's a serious and life-threatening condition for both babies caused by an abnormal connections and blood flow between identical twins twins who share one placenta and and so it's fascinating they can go in and this they don't even have to open up mom it's just using really tiny fetal scopes to go in it's very non-invasive and they can then correct the disorder with laser ablation it's it's remarkable we're also seeing congenital heart disease actually going in and repairing the baby's heart is now really on the horizon and Children's Hospital actually performed one of the first surgeries and you can see this little boy here who is obviously one of the first and he's doing very well in playing baseball we see here Cleveland Clinic where they actually performed a rare and complex life-saving surgery to remove a tumor that was attached to the heart of a 26 week old baby and it takes just an incredible team of physicians and you can see again here they got the picture of him while they were doing the surgery the little hand and and then there he is now born on July 13th of 2021 and doing well the most recent one this spring was at Boston Children's actually did they repaired a rare fatal blood disorder that occurred in the brain of a child so this was just remarkable that they're actually able to go in and do brain surgery in the child in the utero and I think this is just a remarkable story that not only that but we actually have what are called adult stem cells that's a whole nother talk but these these that are literally life-saving and so what they found that they can actually use a mother's own cells and in some cases the father's cells to actually help to correct blood disorders in these babies so what they do is they collect the stem cells from the mom this pregnant and then they basically give them back to the baby in utero it's like a stem it's like a blood transplant but inside the womb and this is saving babies with blood disorders such as alpha thalassemia it's remarkable and this just reminds me of just that connection with the mom and the baby because this paper talks about forever connected the lifelong biological consequences of fetal maternal and maternal fetal my chimerism a lot of words but basically mom and baby exchange cells in DNA very early on as early as six weeks and that lasts for a lifetime so those part of that baby is with the mom not even if that child isn't alive anymore they're forever connected it's remarkable and I just want to and they're showing that this this is a quote from the paper this intricate exchange of genetically foreign cells creates a permanent connection that contributes to the survival of both individuals and it's just it's remarkable how God engineered just that connection that bond between the mother and the child not only just you know emotionally but actually at a very the most basic granular and cellular and molecular level it is just absolutely outstanding and because of that fact some people are using that that that that that because we know that the baby's blood and DNA and and cells can be found in the mother's bloodstream there is what's called non-invasive prenatal testing so they they take advantage of the fact that they can they can find the baby's DNA in the mom's blood because there are invasive techniques where you can actually go in and like through amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling very invasive techniques and they actually are at risk to the baby but now they've discovered that they can just get a blood sample from mom a routine blood sample and say okay does this baby have any genetic abnormalities okay they were meant to be a way to help the baby what we're finding is that a lot of these screens that look for rare disorders are usually wrong especially the ones that are most rare I've written about this if you're interested it's actually really quite sad because it's becoming kind of an arms race between these technologies and I think something that was meant to be helpful has really turned to be harmful and so what we're seeing is that babies like Down syndrome I'm showing you the karyotype of them as you remember these are the chromosomes so babies with Down syndrome have an extra chromosome 21 that's why it's called trisomy 21 they have three chromosome 21 instead of two and similarly there's other trisomy disorders like trisomy 13 or 18 in which chromosome 13 or 18 has now three instead of two and this I am very passionate about this because I am reminded of Exodus 411 when Moses says no I can't go to Pharaoh and God says but who gave man his mouth who makes him deaf or mute who gives him sight or makes him blind is it not I the Lord we go back to the beginning God created us created us for a purpose we are wonderfully fearfully and wonderfully made he designs everything about us he determines what type of DNA we have and he determines how long he has ordained every single one of our days and so what's happening is that a lot of these babies once they're diagnosed with these disorders they are not given a chance we know that a lot of these babies in some cases up to 70 and 80 percent of them are never given a chance to life and they are literally being thrown away because they're thought of as not valuable and I want to remind you that even in cases of trisomy 13 and 18 you will often hear physicians say that these are fatal disorders fatal disorders and but when you actually look at the science we see that they're they might be life-limiting but they're hardly legal or incompatible with life some of the most recent papers show that that that there's significant longer-term survival is possible with select patients especially receive the right treatment these papers combined show that even if you don't do anything some of these babies will live to 10 years of age others if you they offer the right interventions especially in cardiac cases they can live anywhere from 11 to 53 years of age will there be will there be quality of life issues yes but it's just remembering that God holds every these are his children he designed them and for however long they might live there is always what's called perinatal palliative care and perinatal hospice where parents can they receive healing without a cure if there isn't a cure like we've talked about like outside the womb a treatment or if there isn't a treatment inside the womb that this provides a safe place for families to meet their child face to face the child that they were given by God the gift and to be parents for however long their child may survive he ordains our days he ordains everything he is in control and we have put together a website called prenatal diagnosis dot org to prove so that parents understand just really understand from a from a life affirming perspective just how beautiful every that their child is no matter what diagnosis they get and I'm just going to end with this slide God designed each of us to be unique we are magnificent from the moment of conception it is nothing short of a miracle and God created each one of us for a purpose and we were created to glorify God and I love this psalm it's just the most beautiful thing let everything that has breath praise the Lord we were created to glorify God and Jesus came into the world in the same way as we did with the purpose of glorifying the Father in heaven by conquering sin dying on the cross saving sinners just like you and me and I my prayer is that we we look at every child the way that God that God created through the eyes of Christ with humility with wonder with awe compassion and love from the very moment of conception up until natural death when he says it's time so I thank you for your time and I'd be happy to answer any questions.