Throwing the Word "Science" Around

It seems that I hear the word science a lot used by people who are not scientists but want to put down people with a pro-life view. The "unscientific" seem to most commonly be those who think things like embryonic stem cell research to be unethical. The reasoning seems to go something like, " Embryonic stem cell research holds a lot of promise for helping serious diseases so it must be the right thing to do. Yes, I understand why people may have a problem with it but in the furture this will help people with serious illnesses so science will be vindicated in the end." What does this have to do with "scientific" or "unscientific"? People with pro-life view points aren't objecting to the fact that this research may help people but to the destruction of human life in the process (to state the obvious). What those who consider themselves to be enlightened and "scientific" are really saying is that to hold value in human life at its earliest stages to the time of natural death (traditional pro-lif stance) makes you a neanderthal. Is this idea based on science or is it ideologically driven? I think we can easily see that it is the later. Ironically the pro-escr crowd accuse Bush's policy of banning federal funding on escr as being ideologically driven and being "unscientific". Not providing funds for for ethical reasons is not a scientific decision but a policy decision so I'm baffled at the word unscientific being thrown around in regard to this. To quote Wesley J. Smith from his blog Second Hand Smoke in the entry Media/Obama Conflate Ethics Dispute with Science. "...they don't have the candor to admit they are as political and ideological as their opponents. Instead, they pretend they are objective, indeed, scientific. That may be a good political tactic, but nothing could be further from the truth."