| </span><blockquote><span class="smallfont">Quote:</span><hr size="1" />Originally Posted by
This isn't 'philosophy', the notion that every individual human lifetime starts at a conception. That is an astonishingly assertion perhaps offered in an effort to frame the argument along false lines. But nice try. And yes, try and find even one Embryologist who would refute that the individual human being has it's beginning at conception. HINT, their entire discipline is based on that axiom, Rachel.
No, Rachel, tests have validity for the emerging child because the embryo IS the same individual as the child, at her/his earliest age. I appreciate your opinion and would note for you that the brain begins forming within days of conception and isn't entirely finished forming until well after the individual leaves the water world and enters the air world.<hr size="1" /></blockquote><span class='postcolor'>
What makes a unique human being? One would argue it is experiences that shape us, and our comprehension of those experiences that create the individual. How do we experience and comprehend? With our brain. So then, how can a fetus within the first trimester that has yet to fully form limbs, let alone a brain, be considered a unique human life? All that is there is a developing group of cells in the process of becoming an individual, but not yet an individual. Arguing its possibility of developing into an individual would not be much different from arguing the possibility of every girl's menstrual cycle to have been an individual if they had been impregnated, and so on.
I believe you are mistaken to some extent because arguments and perceptions such as these fuel debate as to when the individual life truly begins. Debate which most definitely exists among embryologists as well. Every sperm and egg is alive, but they are not human beings, just the possibility of one. However, neither is a fertilized egg, which leads to argument regarding the embryo itself; at what point in time that embryo can be considered a "life" in its cycle of development.
One famous embyrologist known as Clifford Grobstein is famous for his demonstration as to point out that the newly fertilized egg (zygote) is no bigger than a period on a printed page. His argument to this was, "How can a single cell be considered a human being, a person, an entity endowed with unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?" I would have to agree that it is overzealous and proposterous.
However, we're talking about cloning and not abortion, which has entirely different implications. |