I’m afraid I consider it ‘dehumanizing’ to call an embryo-aged human ‘a potential human being’. Your mileage may vary, but a rational explanation for your beliefs will be assumed until shown otherwise. I just don’t agree that a several hundred cell embryo is not yet a human being.
I’m afraid I consider it ‘dehumanizing’ to call an embryo-aged human ‘a potential human being’. Your mileage may vary, but a rational explanation for your beliefs will be assumed until shown otherwise. I just don’t agree that a several hundred cell embryo is not yet a human being.
If you test embryos at the 3 day old stage, you find that many are aneuploid; their chromosomes are mismatched in number and they will stop growing and progressing quite early. Before week 13. This aneuploidy of the embryo is nearly totally the result of an aneuploid EGG. The sperm can be at fault but not as often.
So those embryos, while human, while deserving of respect as life, will never ever ever make a baby. They will never ever ever grow to the 2nd trimester.
And mostly we do not know this about our embryos, so we should treat each embryo as if it would become a full human. But an embryo that never could become a baby would be a strange thing if it were given equal status to a human being. It’s a potential human.
Life begins at conception. That is for sure. But some embryos don’t make it - sometimes from external factors, but mostly from chromosomal factors that can be predicted if the embryos are CGH tested.