NP - Stem Cell Fumble

[David Morris]

http://www.mostnewyork.com/2001-08-14/News_and_Views/Opinion/a-121724.asp

Through the miracle of modern science -- miniaturization and all that -- 
this column will take you into the fallopian tubes of your ordinary woman of 
childbearing age. A sperm is swimming like crazy toward the egg. It makes 
contact and fertilizes it. The egg then moves up the tube so it can attach 
itself to the wall of the womb.

But -- oh, no! -- it cannot do so. No pregnancy results. Oh well, maybe next 
time.

This process takes place -- I have invented the actual statistic -- 2.6 
billion times a month. That is the number of times sexual intercourse 
produces a fertilized egg that does not result in a pregnancy. Left to its 
own devices, nothing would happen. Still, is that fertilized egg a life? The 
answer is no. Life requires additional steps -- adhering to the wall of the 
womb, just for starters. Life requires progressing from the embryo stage to 
the fetus stage -- and maybe then some. But if the process is interrupted, 
which is more the rule than the exception in nature, we do not have life. We 
had merely the potential for it.

>From: "Kato du Bois"
>
>And here's another perspective, one easily missed if one gets lost in the 
>pro-life vs. big-science rhetoric ...
>
>... that these potential, future and/or theoretical processes might lead to 
>a slippery slope, a desensitizing to widespread human parts production and 
>half-way-there cloning; I, who would otherwise would hate to see the 
>pro-life bunch get their way, eventually found that possibility to be too 
>frightening.
>
>or maybe I'm paranoid.

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