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To: general_re
This is tripping the alarm with me: ... could potentially become an actual new, independent life. I've addressed the poor reasoning of 'potentil life', so I'll merely state that conceiving a so severely handicapped individual life that it cannot survive beyond designated threshold is perhaps even more abhorrent for a target of research.
55 posted on 04/26/2003 2:14:18 PM PDT by MHGinTN (If you can read this, you've had life support from someone. Promote Life Support for others.)
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To: MHGinTN
I've addressed the poor reasoning of 'potentil life', so I'll merely state that conceiving a so severely handicapped individual life that it cannot survive beyond designated threshold is perhaps even more abhorrent for a target of research.

Oh, well, you ought to be okay with parthenogenesis then - no conception required.

Yes, I know - that's not quite what you had in mind ;)

For me, for the moment, I would put something like parthenogenesis on approximately the same level as culturing any other cell in the laboratory. Is it immoral to take a sample of my tissue and promote its replication in the lab? Surely not - there's no long-term viability for those cells, no way for them to do anything on their own once we stop artificially keeping them alive, not even potentially.

I don't see anything so far to cause me to think that promoting replication in an unfertilized egg - or sperm, since you can do it that way, too - is of some other moral plane than causing any other cell to replicate. Things change when the egg is fertilized - conception. I just don't see what pushing the definition of life beyond that point gets us, other than drawing an artificial line simply because we can - we've gone from life beginning at quickening, to life beginning at implantation, to life beginning at conception, and now we're going to push the start of life back so far that essentially we're saying that life is created the minute an unfertilized egg comes into existence, but I don't for the life of me see any moral or rational justification for such a definition. Call that what you will, but I'll require a bit more persuading on that point - and I hardly think I'm alone on this.

74 posted on 04/27/2003 9:26:54 PM PDT by general_re (Honi soit la vache qui rit.)
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