Life starts after 14 days, say Anglicans

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.

"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."

Easy, when I can measure it (egocentric grin).
I still can't figure out why you're picking at this point, why you think that defining and dividing sequences of events changes the status or state of the not-quite-14 day old embryo.

Even within the continuum, energy and matter undergo changes that are discrete. Choosing which change is significant as the end of one reaction and the beginning of another is not necessarily arbitrary -dictionary definitions notwithstanding - although, for us humans, it may seem to be since it's a matter of ability to measure and detect and report.

With better reflexes, technology, and knowledge, I might be able to detect the letter sooner than a presbyopic unenhanced middle aged lady. The fact that the good-reflex-me can detect the beginning of the appearance of the letter sooner than the middle-aged me does not change the fact that there was a first change on the screen.

For that matter, even if the observer has a cataract and sees yellow, does not change the actual light given off.

The fact that there are infinitisimal steps in fertilization does not change anything. The fact that scientists will disagree on when the cell may be called a zygote as opposed to a fertilized oocyte, does not change anything - there is a time when there is no human being in the fallopian tube or petri dish, and then a time when there is.

At that point, there is a new human being that has the right not to be killed intentionally by another human, unless the new human is a danger to the life of human being(s).

Carnley denies that the zygote "is a human life" because he wishes to justify killing zygotes and embryos.

My individual specialized cells do not have the right not to be killed, since they are a component of me, and, unless quite a number of them are killed, I, the human being will continue to live.

Oocytes and sperm cells do not have the right not to be killed, either. They are motile, specialized cells, but they never demonstrate "Growth with Reproduction, Inheritance, and Variability." Even the stauchest no-contraception advocate will not consider that a human being's life is taken with spermicides or condoms or if ovulation is blocked.

At your rate, we'd be defending life "before you were a twinkle in your father's eyes."

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