When you use the term fetus, do you mean everything from a fertilized egg up to the point of birth? Technically, of course, it’s not a fetus until about week 8 after fertilization (it’s an embryo before that). I suspect your answer is “yes”.
So next I would ask if you differentiate between an embryo inside the mother and one that is in a petri dish. If I let the latter die, I am killing a person, in your view?
If the answer to that is also “yes”, then I’d have to ask where we draw the line at what a person is. If a one cell fertilized egg in a petri dish is a human being, then why isn’t a skin cell in a petri dish also a human being? Both can potentially become a full term baby, but not without a bit of technical help. Neither, however, will ever become a full term baby on its own.
I would say that a good way to define the difference is this…if you implant both in a uterus, what would happen? One will become a baby, the other won’t. The technical help involved is quite different from one to the other, wouldn’t you say?
You didn’t answer the first two parts of the 3-part question. The answer to the middle part determines whether the last part is even meaningful.
But to answer your question, neither would likely become a baby. You have to do more than just “implant” the embryo into a uterus-- the woman must receive hormone treatments, and in some cases other medical treatment as well. I think what you are going to find yourself doing is saying that whatever you have to do to make the fertilized egg into a baby is the determining factor, and that is simply an arbitrary delineation. If I can add two more steps to the process and make a skin cell into a baby, there really is no essential difference.
I’m sorry, I took those questions as rhetorical! I figured by now you knew my stance on that. OK, for clarity’s sake, yes, by “fetus” I am referring to the entire gestational period. Mostly just because it seems to be an easy term to use. Personally, I prefer the term “baby,” but some folks around here seem to think that’s unfair rhetoric (like calling pro-choicers “pro-abortion”), so I generally use the term “fetus” now as a substitute.
And, yes, I see no moral difference between an embryo in a petri dish and one inside a mother.
But what the two things fundamentally are a simply different. One is a skin cell, and one is not. I’m not sure it matters what the plans are with it. To people who are planning to implant that embryo, it’s value is far, far above that of a skin cell…and you can’t tell me that there is no legitimate reason why that is.
But both can become a baby and both require technical help in order to do so. The only difference is the nature of that help.
I’m sure that’s true, but I don’t see how that enters the equation. If we have a bunch of embryos in storage somewhere that no one intends to implant, then there is no difference between that and any other human tissue. People can be as emotionally attached to their pets as to their children, but it’s still not murder to kill the pet.
I think another way to look at this is, and I mean no insult to you: saying that a fertilized egg is a human being is on par with saying that God created human beings in their present form and we did not evolve from non-human apes. In both instances, the development of the embryo and the evolution of a species, you can (figuratively) see that a human being has come into existence from something that was not at one time a human being, but you cannot pin down the precise moment that happened. In both cases you have something that might turn into a human being if left to its own devices, but isn’t a human being at a certain point in time. An Australopithecine* isn’t a human being, but it’s descendants might be. A fertilized egg isn’t a human being, but its descendants might be (cell descendants, that is).
*using that term to mean whatever pre-*Homo *ancestor eventually gave rise to us.
I would just like to add a point. The embryo is not a fully formed human being that simply grows up, it is in essence a recipe or blueprint, a set of instructions on how to make a person. The embryo has no brain no mind just a set of genetic instructions.
Not quite true. What you said is correct, if we are talking about a fertilized egg or a few weeks old embryo. But a 7 week old embryo does have a “brain”, although it isn’t a brain capable of human thought. It also has a heart that beats. (Not that I’m saying I consider such an embryo to be a person, btw.)
Human chimeras occur with some regularity. What might have been fraternal twins becomes, instead, one individual when two fertilized eggs attach to each other in the first few days after conception. The resulting person will have a mixture of cells throughout his/her body but will generally be unremarkable-- most chimeras never even know they are one.
We could easily do that with two early stage embryos in a petri dish, making only one organism where there once was two. If we implant that embryo into a woman with the normal in vitro fertilization techniques, then a perfectly normal baby will be born. Assuming that the pregnancy takes, and defining “normal” as something that occurs naturally all the time. (There can be some problems inherent in chimeras, especially if the two embryos were of different genders, but let’s ignore that for the point of this discussion.)
Did we kill a person in that process? Where there once were two persons (using the pro-life definition here), there is now only one.
John Mace, no disrespect meant to you at all…you make a great point, and normally I would love to discuss this with you at length, but I don’t think I can go around about this right now.
“Lost” was not one of the choices. The question is was one “killed”.
Here’s another example. We take the embryo when it’s just two cells, and separate the cells. We now have identical twins. Then we put them back together, so that they develop into one baby. Was a person killed in that process?
Keep in mind that in both examples no cells were destroyed.
Killed, sure. Murder requires intent, however. Yes, it’s something of a semantical tap dance.
Well, however likely the hypothetical, anytime we deliberately eliminate the inexorable progression of a distinct entity, we’ve destroyed that entity’s future. He’s lost, killed, obliterated–choose your own verb–in a manner that eliminates a person who would have developed with a distinct identity.
Would you say the same could be said of not even eliminating but changing that progression? If I horribly insult you, you may develop a bad opinion of me (which would be reasonable!); have I effectively “killed” the future of a being like you but who has no bad opinion of me?
I thought about putting “that being the future you’re experiencing now” but I realised that would assume you don’t have a bad opinion of me anyway.
Nope, that objective is lost at the start. We are all subjected to countless “normal” variables that will affect our futures, some predictably, some not. So long as you don’t violate the civil rights of another, it’s just something we all need to deal with.
That would be a good assumption. I think you’re a good egg.
I was assuming that the act was done purposely, so there shouldn’t be an issue of intent-- intent is there.
What is inexorable about a cell in a petri dish? It can’t develop into a full term baby unless we take extraordinary steps to allow it to do so.
In the two-cell embryo case, each cell is capable of being a distinct entity. Are we required to separate them in order to facilitate the “inexorable progression” take place? After all, by allowing them to stay together, we are denying a twin the chance to live.
Not a lawyer here, so excuse me if I’m misusing terms, but the person getting an abortion does not believe it’s a murder, was my point. But I think I made my perspective clear–a person has been obliterated.
My answer? We shouldn’t have started the whole petri dish scenario. But for sure, doing so should be with the intention of bringing the fetus or fetuses to term. IMO, obviously.
If your hypothetical is that this circumstance was created without any realistic options for implanting the fetus or fetuses, then what you have here is, well, a crappy situation, one without clear solutions. And one that was created deliberately and unnecessarily.
To answer the other question, we are not required to artificially “force” twins to occur. Having created that scenario, though, we are obliged to respect the distinct entities that have been created. My advice? Let’s not muck around in petri dishes and we can avoid such dilemmas.
I don’t think so. We don’t make the killing of a teenager a worse crime than the killing of someone 40 years old (all other things being equal). But in either circumstance you’ve destroyed that person’s future and you’ve committed a felony.
In civil suits, of course, a person’s age can be a factor. Wrongful death lawsuits can produce different results if the plaintiff was an “in his prime” wage earner, as opposed to an 85-year-old retiree. So the law does contemplate such distinctions in instances where damages are concerned. Or so I have read.
As a minor note, the mucking around isn’t done just for the heck of it. These procedures are typically specifically sought by women who want very much to become pregnant, but can’t for some medical reason, and to maximize the chance of a successful pregnancy, multiple fertilized embryos are created.
So, is it worth destroying a few dozens microscopic embryos as by-products of one successful pregnancy? Block the use of petri dishes and you deny a child to someone who genuinely wants one.
Though, again, I feel it’s a huge mistake to get into hairsplitting arguments over when, if ever, a fetus becomes a person. The entire debate is irrelevant.
The question is was one “killed”.