it was explicitly written to make fun of the genre of musical comedy: Every Sperm is Sacred' is not a parody of these things, it just is those things, it's a musical song, it's a hymn, it's a Lionel Bart-style musical, but it's not making fun of a Lionel Bart-style musical." The song was performed at Monty Python Live (Mostly), with Idle singing Palin's part. It was also followed by the discussion from Protestant married couple with Palin and Jones playing the Protestant husband and wife respectively. Influence Sexuality and reproduction The phrase "every sperm is sacred" has become almost proverbial in the field of animal and human sexuality and reproduction. This extends to such areas as cloning, where the song is used to criticize anti-cloning activists who argue that every embryo or fertilized egg is sacred. Abortion-rights activists have sung the song outside abortion clinics to ridicule their opponents, legal scholars have alluded to it in discussions of women's reproductive rights, and Emily Martin describes its usage as a reductio ad absurdum of anti-abortion positions. Religion The religious import of the sketch is significant, and is reflected in the widely dispersed usage of the phrase. In the book Monty Python and Philosophy, the argument is teased out to reach a broader (still humorous) conclusion: "The Pythons ask us to consider the consequences of the belief that God cares about our reproductive practices and sees everything. If so, then he watches our sexual activities. ...Christians must concede that all things considered, this [watching people have sex] is one of God's less onerous activities." Philip Jenkins discusses the sketch as an important sign of a growing willingness in the popular media of the 1970s and 1980s to criticize the Catholic Church, saying that "Catholic attitudes toward sex and contraception are ruthlessly parodied" in the song, proving that "Catholicism was available as a legitimate subject of serious fiction." Richard Dawkins, in his The God Delusion, cites the song for that reason, the illustration of the "surreal idiocy" of some pro-religion, anti-abortion arguments. Masturbation It is sometimes difficult to separate the comic from the serious application of the phrase, and two recent publications on the penis use it for precisely that purpose, Talking Cock, by Richard Herring, and Dick: A User's Guide. In both cases, the sketch is used to ridicule those who condemn masturbation, and sex for any purpose other than procreation.