>> Some people on this thread believe that the 8 celled
>> embryos have a soul and therefore cannot not be
>> destroyed without moral consequence.
> Yet I don't see them lining up for implantation.
I wonder where the notion that the soul is created as soon as an egg is fertilized comes from. An embryo which is only an 8 cell blastosphere still has the potential to split into identical twins. So where does the extra soul come from? Did God place two souls in the single blastosphere knowing that it was going to split later? Or does he add the second soul after the blastosphere splits in two? Or does he not add any souls until later in fetal development? Or maybe identical twins (but not fraternal twins) share a single soul?
Many pregnancies start out with dual embryos, but one of them vanishes very early on. What happens to the vanished twin's soul in that case? Do the vanished twins have a soul that goes to heaven (even if it is unbaptised)? Or does it go to limbo? Or is a vanished twin just a collection of cells waiting to get a soul at a later date?
Since as many as 1 in 8 pregnancies start out with dual embryos, if the vanished embryos all go up to heaven, then as many as 12.5% of souls in heaven would be people who never made is out of the few hundred cell stage. I wonder what it would be like to meet one of these souls in heaven considering their only worldly experiences were a few weeks as a few hundred cells prior to having developed any nervous system.
jas3
That's the question the anti-birth control crowd hates to answer. Their reasoning starts to unravel, entwining itself with poorly reasoned theology with little Biblical basis. If you keep poking them, they'll swarm from the hive!
An innocent soul doesn't require baptism in order to go to Heaven. God knows what's going to happen in the development of embryos and allots and takes home souls accordingly.
It will be a joyful time for the parents of incomplete pregnancies to finally get to be with the children they never even had a chance to hold.