Posted on 11/06/2003 2:43:16 PM PST by nickcarraway
Life does not begin when sperm meets egg, but 14 days after, according to the head of the Anglican Church in Australia.
Primate Peter Carnley told the Fertility Society of Australia in Perth yesterday this meant objections to IVF, genetic testing and stem cell research should fall away.
Archbishop Carnley said that until it was implanted in a womb lining, a fertilised egg was not a human life but rather a genetically novel kind of cell.
The fertilised egg must also pass the point that it could split to become an identical twin, which was at about 14 days. After that, the embryo should be accorded the status of an individual human with rights to care, protection and life.
Dr Carnley's position clearly contradicts that of the Catholic Church, which holds that life begins when an egg is fertilised.
But Dr Carnley said the debate about the beginning of life within the Christian faith did not come to that view until 1869, when Pius IX declared all abortion was wrong from the beginning of conception.
Dr Carnley argued that scientific knowledge had moved forward since then and must be taken into account.
If conception was defined as the meeting of gametes - egg and sperm - then the cloned sheep Dolly was not conceived, because Dolly was the product of cell nuclear transfer, where the ovum nucleus was replaced by DNA from an adult cell.
"I think it is now clear that we must begin to think of conception less as a moment and more in gradual and continuous terms as a process," Dr Carnley said.
He said since 1984 Anglican moral theology had concluded that conception was a 14-day process and this helped shape legislation around the world.
"Given that twinning can occur up to the 14th day of this process, it is not logically possible to talk of the conception of a unique human individual prior to the completion of this process.
"Each of us can say that we came to be in the sense that we were each conceived, as a potential human individual, 14 days after the fertilisation of an ovum, not before." He said the natural 60 per cent wastage of ova during IVF procedures need not be considered the killing of conceived human individuals.
"We do not have some 70,000 frozen people on ice at various places around Australia," he said.
Embryo experimentation and stem cell research were also morally acceptable.
"If there is a utilitarian argument for the possible benefit to mankind of experimentation on embryos, this could be tolerated in a controlled way under licence up until the 14th day in a way that after the 14th day it would not," he said.
"Stem cell research becomes also thinkable, for stem cells are harvested well within the 14th day period."
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I'm pro-life but I have always been uneasy defining a "full human life" as beginning at conception, and this long before I had even heard of notions of stem cell harvesting and cloning.
When I read that Scripture talks about God knitting me together in the womb, I see it as a process not an event: that if I were to stop a woman from knitting a sweater a minute after she began knitting it, I would hardly be destroying a sweater.
Similarly, I consider God's formation of Adam in Genesis. He formed him from the dust, and then breathed life into him. Had God been somehow interrupted during the formation process, would the perpetrator be guilty of murder, or of an offense comparable to diving into a pile of freshly raked leaves?
Having said that, I've had the privilege of seeing an ultrasound of my own child only a few short weeks after conception---long before many people even realize they are pregnant. I would never have dreamed of intentionally harming that innocent life at this stage, nor would I like to see anyone else do the same to theirs.
During the travels from conceprion to exit into the uterus, the embryo takes on the appearance of a mulberry fruit, thus it is called a 'morula'. Twinning may occur from the totipotent and pluripotent cells of the morula. But the false 'christian' Archbissect is caliming a logical fallacy, that because a second individual may emerge from the morula package there isn't a first individual present in the morula package.
In science, the zygote is the first celled age of the entire lifetime of at least one new human being begun at fusion of parent chromosomes. Every cell from then onward, for trillions of cells, will have that same 46 chromosome identity ... but it is possible for a second or even third individual to arise from that 46 chromosome beginning and it doesn't negate the fact that at least one individual began at the fusion of the parent chromosomes.
The big argument today is the partial birth of a child and the murderous act of ramming scissors into its brain.
(It disgusts me to even type that.)
But talk about a "moot point"; fertilization or 14 days after? What am I missing?
Sorry I missed the point!
Lest you think this issue is indisputable, let me tell you that I personally am not 100% convinced by your arguments. They are indeed intelligent and compelling but not watertight. The presence of 46 chromosomes does not necessarily connote identity. After all, if someone takes a biopsy of living tissue, the cells taken do not immediately die, and they all have my 46 chromosomes---and nobody would claim that they have the rights of an individual. Now obviously they will die momentarily from lack of nourishment, but so would a zygote forcibly removed from implantation, so in that sense the two are not appreciably different.
I'm sure you have a response for this---but my point is that this is an arguable issue. And between Christians we have to be more gracious.
Even identical twins can have biological differences. Identical twins do have the same genes but never the same mitochondria (which also contain genetic material). The mitochondria split into two different sets at the very first division of the fertilized egg-before twinning occurs.
Because, as they are, those cells would not grow into an individual, even if they were kept alive.
It would be hard to got hrough life without determining whether various things are alive or not. In fact this thread seems to mostly consist of people debateing various ways to tell whether or not something is alive.
More superstitutious nonsense from the Charch of England which likes to try to catch up with the world rather than with the Holy Spirit.
...there is substantial evidence that discordance between MZ twins in fact has a genetic component. MZ twins develop from a separation of the embryonic cells at any point from the two-cell stage up until as late as day 8 when the primordial streak has already started to form.[4] The timing of the separation has consequences for the genetic composition of each twin, as the cells become more heterogeneous with time with respect to the mitochondria they carry [5] and the pattern of methylation, and hence potential gene expression, they display.[6]I wonder if Archbishop Carnley would be willing to change his deadline a little. Maybe, if he is looking for some arbitrary cutoff date, he should say that embryos up to 8 days, not 14 days, can be destroyed.
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