I thought this quote to be interesting from Dr. Yamanaka, one of the first discoverers of how to “successfully turn adult skin cells into the equivalent of human embryonic stem cells without using an actual embryo.”

“When I saw the embryo, I suddenly realized there was such a small difference between it and my daughters,” said Dr. Yamanaka, 45, a father of two and now a professor at the Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences at Kyoto University. “I thought, we can’t keep destroying embryos for our research. There must be another way.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/11/science/11prof.html?_r=2&oref=slogin

He must be a fundamentalist right wing religious fanatic like me (sarcasm).

Anyway, it’s a shame that Obama continues to push for federal funding for embryonic stem cell research even after this amazing discovery that should really put an end to the debate.

You cannot lose what makes you human. You are either a dead human or a live human. There is no in between.

When I said coma, I was not referring to brain death. Regardless, the fact that self-awareness can be lost, even temporarily, means that it is not a requirement for personhood.

It’s guilt tripping to call an embryo a baby? Wow. My pregnant friends have always done that. I never thought they were trying to give anyone a guilt trip. It seems to me that we use the word “baby” when we’re going to keep the organism and “fetus” or “blob of cells” when we are going to abort the organism.

If your sarcastic sounding question was meeting me half way, then again, I apologize. It certainly seemed sarcastic at first, and even re-reading it now it still looks like a sarcastic remark.

I’m sorry that you’re sorry, but I am glad you commented. The discussion has been beneficial for me, anyway.

You said: “It was basically a 50/50 chance whether any of us survived beyond conception, so spontaneous abortion can’t really be called “an exception to the rule.”"

First of all, I’d like to see the data for that statistic. Even if it’s true, “spontaneous abortions” are something unavoidable. How does that make it okay to deliberately kill an innocent human being? If someone is dying of cancer, and they have a 50% chance of survival, does that make it okay to deliberately kill that person?

I understand your position now on a human being not being a person at all stages of its life. This is really key to the whole argument I suppose. To me, human being = person.

“Mr. Sagan was awesome, and a scientist, which is a good start”
I still don’t see what that has to do with anything. It’s generally not convincing to quote an astronomer as an authority on embryology.

I really, really resent you trying to guilt trip me by using words like “baby” and “child” for anything from 2 cells to a 9 month old unborn,
“Human being” is a word, a name for a state called humanity that develops gradually, and yes humanity can also leave a human body. Both me and my mother do not wish to be kept alive if we should become little more than warm shells.

I regard keeping someone’s body alive on machines with the same disgust that you have for abortion, you can lose what makes you human, and you can not have it yet.
People who are sleeping still have brain activity, and sleep (loss of conventional self-awareness for several hours) is very different to being brain-dead, or not having a brain.

If you’re going to use guilt-tripping, giving the status of person to something that does not have a brain, attributing time-wasting sarcasm to someone who was trying to meet you half way, and failing to know the difference between DNA and base sequence, you’re cause is not going to make much progress.

I’m sorry to have said anything, I’m going to say goodbye now and spend my last week before starting university doing something else.

To argue that it’s okay to deliberately kill a human being in the womb because his or her chances of survival are 50/50 is absurd. The same logic could be applied to children in Africa. Is it okay to deliberately kill them because they have a low survival rate anyway?

You said, “while 46 may equal new human life, I do not accept that it equals new human being.” Fertilization is the point where a new biological individual is formed. As Dr. Fritz Baumgartner stated, “There is no greater pivotal moment in our growth and development than when 23 chromosomes from our father join with 23 chromosomes from our mother to form a unique, new biologic entity who heretofore simply had not existed. This new biological individual is complete, has a gender, and is fully and uniquely programmed and equipped to grow and develop and change until death. All he or she needs is nutrition and a warm place to grow.”
http://www.prolife.com/life_begins.html

Applying personhood to any stage of development other than at the point where the new individual comes into existence is arbitrary. Self-awareness? Does the person in a coma cease being a person? What about the person who is asleep? No, so personhood is not linked to self-awareness. Personhood should be granted to every human being regardless of their stage of development.

P.S. Your comments are being posted twice every time. Please press the submit button only once.

If you’re going to be mourning the tragedy of zygotes that don’t implant, you’re going to be mourning about half the conceptions on the planet.
” Sometimes a baby might cease to develop at any stage in his or her life”
MILLIONS of times.
It was basically a 50/50 chance whether any of us survived beyond conception, so spontaneous abortion can’t really be called “an exception to the rule.”
Mr. Sagan was awesome, and a scientist, which is a good start, and besides THIS is the opinion of an embryologist:
“Current perspectives on when human life begins range from fertilization to gastrulation to birth and even after. Contemporary scientific literature proposes a variety of answers to the question of when human life begins”. (Gilbert) Most of the quotes I put up are from Gilbert, an embryologist.

I know that 23+23=46, but while 46 may equal new human life, I do not accept that it equals new human being, that’s why I dispute the significance of this statement, and why you need the idea of personhood. I can see that I’m getting nowhere on the gametes are the two halves/ are individual human life/ have as much potential as the zygotes that fail more than half the time idea. However, it’s not a completely crazy idea, it’s the position of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches.
To me your position sounds like saying everyone should eat the bread they make, because to not do so is a waste, and then saying it’s okay and not a waste to dump tonnes of flour in the sea.
What is the bread made of Ash? What are you not going to have without flour?

Your position on twinning is not cool, are soon-to-be-twinning zygotes not unique individuals? Non-twinning zygotes and twinning zygotes are the same, up until the point when the twins’ blastocyst breaks in half coming out of the shell. It was a unique individual that was accidentally cut in half…

This is the thing that should interest you most:
“Division of the zygote into two embryos is not considered to be a hereditary trait, but rather an anomaly that occurs in birthing at a rate of about three in every 1000 deliveries worldwide, regardless of race”.
(from Wikipedia, quoting April Holladay)

“Identical twins do not run in families and, therefore, twinning is not related to genetics”.
(April Holladay)

Identical twins probably result from the blastocyst hatching less-than-perfectly out of it’s shell, and up to that point a zygote that goes on to form one fetus and a zygote that goes on to form twins (or triplets, if things are very messy) were the same.

“If you say “human life is an unbroken chain dating back hundreds of thousands of years, so it is okay to kill unborn babies,” then the same logic can be applied to human beings at any stage of development.”

You’re right Casey, that’s why you need personhood to go with it.
Personhood is not something that anyone has satisfactorily defined with science, so this seems like a philosophical statement to me, and I don’t know what you would support it with. Most people would call a newborn a person and the law of many countries states that it is illegal for doctors to abort a pregnancy over 8 months old (for a scientific reason – it’s almost certainly aware) unless there are unusual complications.
From the point of view of someone who was taught science and has no religion, it seems unlikely that an organism without a nervous system could be self-aware, and if you’re not self aware at all, how can you be a person?

I said: “23 chromosomes from the mother and 23 from the father combine to form a unique, individual human life. How can you dispute this fact?”

You answered: “ASH, I DISPUTE THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THIS FACT.”

Are you saying that whether or not the life is “human” is insignificant? Doesn’t that then make human rights insignificant?

If you were convinced that, through overwhelming evidence, that human life does indeed begin at fertilization, would you still feel the same way?

The “twinning” argument you introduced, although interesting, sounds like an exception to the rule, as Gilbert explains, “the chances of twinning are not very great.” That doesn’t negate the fact that a unique human individual is formed in the majority of cases.

Shannon and Wolter explain, “…it is also possible for it [the zygote] to not continue to develop at all, but rather just become a part of the placenta.”

Once again, this is an exception to the rule. Sometimes a baby might cease to develop at any stage in his or her life (inside or outside the womb), and that’s a tragedy that often can’t be avoided. However, it does not validate the intentional killing of an innocent human being.

“fertilization itself is not even an instantaneous event”
I don’t see the relevance of this. The genesis of the individual is when fertilization is complete.

The Carl Sagan quote, “Neither a sperm and egg separately, nor a fertilized egg, is more than a potential baby or a potential adult”

This was probably the weakest of the arguments you presented. As Sagan was a renowned astronomer, dabbling in genetics for 2 years in college doesn’t make him an expert in embryology. He can pontificate all he wants, but embryologists will disagree. Especially if his ambiguous terms are supposed to mean “potential human.”

Okay, first, the observation that life is continuous is irrelevant. Everyone agrees on this point. If you say “human life is an unbroken chain dating back hundreds of thousands of years, so it is okay to kill unborn babies,” then the same logic can be applied to human beings at any stage of development.

Dr. Kischer, emeritus professor of Anatomy at the University of Arizona, writes, “…the first thing learned in human embryology [is] that the life of the new individual human being begins at fertilization (conception)…we should respect a microscopic human embryo because at that time it is an integrated whole organism, just as the human is at every moment in time until death. Every human embryo deserves as much respect as you or I because it is formed as a new individual human life within the continuum of life …” To deny this, Kischer says, is “a trivialization and corruption of the science of human embryology.”
http://www.all.org/abac/ab020128.htm

As far as twinning goes, the argument assumes that twinning is a random accident. If the information is there from the beginning, then it becomes irrelevant to the discussion (since not all human concepti have the capacity to twin, one could argue that there exists in some concepti a basic duality prior to the split). Since we do not know whether the information is there from the moment of fertilization or not (in the article above, Dr. Kischer states that we do not know why it occurs), to then kill the child based on that reason is to err on the side of death. I’d rather err on the side of life (in the philosophical sense). Moreover, even if the point where twinning generally no longer occurs (around 14 days) is the point when the individual’s life begins, that eliminates the majority of abortions anyway.

You are right. The important distinction is personhood. Is every human being a person? I say yes.