Replies

The laws of the 30 states that recognize the unlawful killing of an unborn child as homicide in at least some circumstances. ^{State Unborn Victim Laws}
State: Homicide laws of all 50 states protect human life and the dignity of every human being--especially the vulnerable; laws of many states already specifically protect vulnerable embryonic human beings outside the womb; most prohibit destructive human embryo and human fetal research. National: The present Congressional ban on federally-funded human embryo research explicitly excludes "research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death"; existing laws requiring separation between the death of an unborn child in abortion and research objectives using the unborn child's tissues preclude the destruction of human embryos as a means of achieving research objectives. International: Documents such as the Nuremburg Code, the World Medical Association's Declaration of Helsinki, and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights reject the use of human beings in experimental research without their informed consent and permit research on incompetent subjects only if there is a legal surrogate, minimal risk, and therapeutic benefit for the human subject. ^{stemcellresearch.org - Founding Statement}
It may strike some as surprising that legal protection of embryonic human beings can co-exist with the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 legalization of abortion.²⁹ However, the Supreme Court has never prevented the government from protecting prenatal life outside the abortion context,³⁰ and public sentiment also seems even more opposed to government funding of embryo experimentation than to the funding of abortion.³¹ The laws of a number of states-including Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Utah-specifically protect embryonic human beings outside the womb. Most of these provisions prohibit experiments on embryos outside the womb.³² ^{CBHD: On Human Embryos and Stem Cell Research}