Imagine that you are watching on television a hearing of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. Each of its members is asking questions of, and in some cases interrogating, the president's most recent nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court. She is an accomplished attorney with not only a law degree from an elite institution but holds a doctorate in biochemistry and had specialized in private practice on issues over which science and law overlap and intersect. For several years she had served on the federal bench on the DC circuit and had done so admirably, showing professional competence and jurisprudential insight that had become the envy of her peers, some of whom disagree with her conservative judicial philosophy. Over the years she has published well-received articles in numerous law reviews and peer-reviewed science publications dealing with issues as wide ranging as the Daubert standard, the reliability of DNA testing in capital murder cases, and whether the Supreme Court's holdings in its reproductive rights cases provide support for a Constitutional right to clone oneself.

She is also a devout Catholic and has published several law review articles critical of the Supreme Court's reproductive rights jurisprudence, and in particular the Court's reluctance to make an argument on either the question of when human life begins or the moral status of that life when in fact it does begin.