Ruth Institute Blog

Zygotes have inalienable rights. Gay adults do not. And we continue to stand in awe of the of the religious right’s insanity.

“the word ‘person’ or ‘persons’ applies to every human being at every stage of biological development of that human being or human organism, including fertilization.”

If that were true, menstruation would be murder.

At all stages. An egg is a stage of biological development. Therefore, an egg is a human being, and menstruation is murder through negligence on part of the mother.

That if this amendment seriously would either require:
1. Making sure that every woman got pregnant before menstruating to protect the precious egg person’s constitutionally protected right to life.
2. Failing that, women get prosecuted for murder and go to jail.

Since that won’t happen, its an acknowledgement that the people writing this language don’t actually believe “the word ‘person’ or ‘persons’ applies to every human being at every stage of biological development of that human being or human organism, including fertilization.”

Clear enough? Or are you going to simply ask another snide question while evading the point?

@Roivas An unfertilized egg is not a stage of being a human. Biology 101, lad.

An important point, Betsy. I think Roivas is wrong that this would mean an egg is a human being, but he’s right that embryos often don’t implant and in those cases menstruation would be murder. But they aren’t murder, because those embryos are not living people yet. They are cells dividing to form a blastocyst and later a fetus that could be a vessel for life, if it implants in the uterus and develops blood and a heart.

It’s an important point when we consider the hundred thousand embryos currently frozen at IVF clinics. What does this initiative imply about them? That we have to find women to carry these frozen babies? That’s terrible! What would it say about a cloned embryo, or an embryo made from stem cell derived gametes? That we have to implant it and bring it to life? That’s even worse! It isn’t a life until there is a beating heart! There are ways to stop people from unethical experimentation on embryos without declaring them to be living persons, just like we prohibit unethical desecrating of dead bodies even though those are no longer living persons but just lifeless bodies.

I don’t think people should dismiss the point. This law would force us to implant experimental embryos and force us to find women to carry all the frozen embryos, and that would cost millions of dollars and be very unethical. The right thing to do is turn off the freezers and let the embryos thaw out and return to dust from whence they came.

You’re right. That would be an implication of my logic chain. But see, I don’t believe in the premises that start the logic chain. You do.

“An unfertilized egg is not a stage of being a human. Biology 101, lad.”

I started as an unfertilized egg. The author of this post did, the writers of this law did, and I’m pretty sure that you did too. Given that we all started as an unfertilized egg, how is it not a stage of being a human?

Beyond the fact you assert it I mean.

Flour and and eggs do not make a cake on their own. Therefore it is wrong to say that a cake started as flour and eggs?

Bits of metal and plastic do not form a car on their own. Therefore it is wrong to say that a car started as said components?

Stage of biological development

egg.

Stage of being a car

metal.

If you don’t like the language, don’t blame me, I didn’t write the law.

Also, what separates an unfertilized egg from a fertilized one in terms of personhood?

It does. With the help of a sperm.

Just as a fertilized one does. With the help of a uterus.

Also, grow into a person? Not just become one?

Both an fertilized egg and unfertilized egg need outside help in order to grow to a full human being.

And yes, you have said it many times. Just as many times you have declined to address my questioning that statement. And so it goes.

@Roivas

No matter how long I leave my eggs in the fridge, I never open the carton and find chicken.

No matter I long I leave a fertilized egg in the fridge, I will never open it and find a human.

As for you Besty, my point being is that based on that fact you still have not defined what separates an unfertilized egg vs. an fertilized egg that makes one a person and the other not. I have made the point that both still require outside help. You have conceded that. Thus remains open the question. What aspect of a fertilized egg demands that it be considered a person that cannot also apply to an unfertilized egg?

Why in the world would people waste the time and money to pass this amendment when it would be completely unconstitutional under the federal Constitution? Has no one ever heard of the Supremacy Clause? I swear, the general lack of knowledge about our own system of government, our laws, our Constitution and our civil rights in this country is appalling.

But Roivas is right that we all started as an egg and as a sperm. If a different egg or sperm met, we’d be different people. Therefore we started as those egg and sperm. People are already purchasing eggs and sperm in order to own the child they become, and they care a lot about choosing good ones.

And Roivas is also onto something about jailing women to rescue the egg. Because by your logic, Betsy, if a man had sex with a woman and there could be a fertilized egg inside her, then he then could claim that he had a right to lock her up and make sure she didn’t menstruate, or she’d go to jail, etc etc. It’s a silly thought, but the point is, we don’t do that, and we won’t do that even after this amendment, so that proves that we don’t really consider embryos that do not implant to be persons with the same rights as ones that implant and begin a pregnancy.

And those embryos in freezers are not ensouled and have not come to life. There is no blood, blood is a biochemical compound, not an abstract concept that can exist inside a cell. Cells exist inside blood. There is no blood in an embryo or any cell, that’s why it’s OK to eat the other cells but not to eat the blood. Embryos are amazing miraculous things, but they are not yet alive with a human spirit or will or soul. The soul leaves the body when the life ends which is when the heart stops beating and the blood stops flowing. We agree about that, right? The body is still there, but there is no life in it anymore. The same thing happens at the beginning of life, the body forms and then it is ensouled with life and the heart starts beating its own blood around.

It will NOT be murder to shut off those freezers! Are you seriously going to object when we shut off the freezers? Your going to protest that we have to keep those things on forever and start lining up women to put the embryos into? Your going to suddenly spring a twin on someone forty years later, or arrest them if they discard their parents extra embryos?

@Betsy
“And what does it mean to be pregnant? To have a human being growing and developing inside of you, of course. ”

You’re not pregnant unless it implants. Lots of couples have sex and create fertilized eggs but they don’t get pregnant because they don’t implant.

I looked into the timing. Fertilization happens in the fallopian tube, and about 4 days later, enters the uterus and starts to implant in the uterus and receive nutrients from the uterus, and at about 7-9 days later the implantation is complete and menstruation is prevented by a hormone released by the embryo. Unless that hormone is released in time, menstruation happens and the fertilized egg is expelled from the body at about 14 days old. That is also the earliest time that pregnancy can be tested for, though women can feel signs of pregnancy earlier, but won’t actually be able to know or say they are pregnant until they’ve missed their period and that’s when we say they are pregnant. If the period comes they don’t generally say they were pregnant but miscarried. It’s only considered a miscarriage if the regular period is late.

So, pregnancy is thought of as starting when the embryo is about 14 days, which is right about when it – now a fetus – starts developing a heart and blood and becomes alive. Isn’t that just too convenient and perfect to ignore? Pregnancy and the baby’s life both begin when the embryo is about two weeks old? The sex and conception probably happened two weeks ago, but that doesn’t always lead to a pregnancy or life.

@Roivas
Male masturbation would be murder.

@Betsy
“John, a new life was still created.”

No, only a new vessel for life, a new human body. If it implants in a woman’s uterus will be ensouled and come to life. That’s why there is a word “ensouled” – it requires that the body exists first, and then is ensouled. Life ends in the reverse way, leaving an lifeless body. I wouldn’t say an embryo is “dead” though. I know it is growing, not decomposing, but God does the growing, not the embryo. It’s a miracle I don’t have to have an answer for.

I agree IVF is wrong and it should be stopped and it is a serious sin and insults human dignity. But we don’t need to declare the embryos human people and say they have a right to be implanted in order to stop IVF or experimentation on human embryos. I am NOT defending embryonic stem cell experimentation when I say it is not murder. Lots of things are crimes even though they are not murder, and embryonic research can be another crime short of murder. For example, it’s not murder to desecrate a corpse, because a corpse is already lifeless, but it is still a major crime people go to jail for.

And I was thinking of how Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t take blood transfusions because the Bible said do not eat the blood of an animal, because the life is in the blood, but it’s OK to eat the meat of an animal. Sorry!!

@Betsy
For the life of the flesh is in the blood – Leviticus 17:11
And the whole thing about drinking the wine that becomes Jesus’s blood is to attain the eternal life that is in Jesus’s blood. (Not sure how that squares with not eating blood – Oh actually I know, I heard the famous Catholic Worker pacifist Elizabeth McAlister explain this at her daughter’s wedding this summer: Jesus was sacrificing himself, saying to drink his blood so that we do not shed the blood of another, and eat his flesh so as to not harm the flesh of another.)

“A fertilized egg cannot be separated back into a sperm and an egg.”

Actually in a way it can. Have you never heard of cloning? It involves taking an already fertilized egg and replacing the present genetic material with that of another.

But even if I were to concede your position on fertile vs infertile, it still would entail huge problems for your position. As detailed above, many pregnancies come and go without people ever knowing. Add on that are about 696,000 lost pregnancies through known miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, molar pregnancies, or still birth, and if these are truly the deaths of people we are talking about, then we truly have a crisis for the ages on our hands.

To put this in perspective, this is 232 times and a bit the amount of people who died in 9/11. Something we declared a now decade long war over.

Given the severity of this yearly massacre, I propose a war on miscarriages.

Lets take a look at the risk factors.

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/miscarriage/DS01105/DSECTION=risk-factors

1. Age. Women older than age 35 have a higher risk of miscarriage than do younger women. At age 35, you have about a 20 percent risk. At age 40, the risk is about 40 percent. And at age 45, it’s about 80 percent.

So, women above the age of 35 should be legally discouraged from pregnancy, therefore from having sex. After all, fertilized ova, and every non-implanted single cell person is a tragedy.

2. Previous miscarriages. The risk of miscarriage is higher in women with a history of more than one previous miscarriage. After one miscarriage, your risk of miscarriage in a future pregnancy is about the same as women who have never had a miscarriage — 20 percent. After two miscarriages, your risk increases to about 28 percent.

Therefore, is a woman has miscarried once, they should be legally prohibited from having sex, as they have already proven to be prone to killing people just by having it.

3. Chronic conditions. Women with certain chronic conditions, such as diabetes or thyroid disease, have a higher risk of miscarriage.

Thus any woman with Diabetes, Antiphospholipid Syndrome, Lupus, Obesity, Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, Hypertension, Celiac Disease or Kidney Issues shall be prosecuted for parental negligence if they should miscarry, for these are known risks and the parent should have known better.

4. Uterine or cervical problems. Certain uterine abnormalities or a weak or unusually short cervix may increase the risk of miscarriage.

Same goes for these medical conditions.

5. Smoking, alcohol and illicit drugs. Women who smoke or drink alcohol during pregnancy have a greater risk of miscarriage than do nonsmokers and women who avoid alcohol during pregnancy. Illicit drug use also increases the risk of miscarriage.

These parents wouldn’t be merely prosecuted for negligence, but for murder by poisoning the person inside them.

6. Invasive prenatal tests. Some prenatal genetic tests, such as chorionic villus sampling and amniocentesis, carry a slight risk of miscarriage.

While something that should be frowned upon, parents are legally entitled to authorized potentially life threatening medical treatments for their children, so this gets a pass.

This is what it would mean to consider every fertilized ova a person, and force people to take responsibility for that fact.

You mean on Twitter?

@Roivas

Roivas, by your “logic” any parent of a child with fatal diseases should be prosecuted. So any parent who has a child that developed leukemia should be prosecuted and forbidden to have more children? How about CF?

Miscarriage is natural death, like natural death from leukemia. There is nothing the mother or her doctor can do to prevent miscarriage.

Abortion is the FORCIBLE dilation of the cervix, the PURPOSEFUL chopping of the human child-in-the-womb to bits, and the PURPOSEFUL vacuuming of said child’s remains from the womb.

Miscarriage is a child-in-the-womb that dies of natural causes for unknown reasons. It wasn’t PREVENTED from developing, it just couldn’t. There is a world of difference between this and PREVENTING a child from developing. Just like there is a world of difference between a child who dies of leukemia and a child who is murdered.

Women who abuse substances in pregnancy should be punished for doing so.

The real war is the purposeful murder of children in the womb. Why don’t you look up the number of children since 1973 that have bee FORCIBLY removed from the womb. Now that is frightening.

I am now going to use a classic lefty “argument”. Roivas, have you ever personally known a woman who has miscarried and suffered under the sadness and pain of that loss? I doubt it or you wouldn’t have dared to write the above post. Honestly, you come off as really immature without much “real world” experience.

This whole discussion is a bit silly. The fact remains that, even if passed, this state constitutional amendment would be unconstitutional under the federal Constitution and will be struck down.

“Do not answer a fool according to his folly.”

@Deb
“Roivas, by your “logic” any parent of a child with fatal diseases should be prosecuted. ”

That’s not his logic, that’s the logic of everyone who says unimplanted embryos are living persons with full human rights. See, he was already doing the “by your logic” thing to Betsy. I’m sure Roivas is not seriously proposing the law he says he proposes. Maybe Betsy is not serious either.

I am serious though, I think we should prohibit embryo freezing and turn off the freezers. I can assure you all that they are NOT ensouled, they are not alive, it is not murder. Whoever is spreading the baseless lie that they are human beings with souls is making it up out of thin air, not based on the Bible, or on morality, or on biology. And it is a terrible position to take if it leads to religious people supporting implanting cloned or GE’d embryos rather than destroying them.

“Miscarriage is a child-in-the-womb that dies of natural causes for unknown reasons. It wasn’t PREVENTED from developing, it just couldn’t. ”

Untrue. I listed the known risk factors. In the same way that a parent isn’t liable if a child falls the stairs and dies but could be if they drowned in their pool and it could be proven that they were being negligent, so a miscarriage could hold a parent liable for neglect if they engaged in actions that directly but the egg person’s life in danger, such as through oh, I don’t know, things like excessive exercise.

That is, if an ova truly is a person who the state has a compelling interest in protecting the life of, whether from accident, neglect or direct killing.

By the way, this isn’t all theoretical. Some people are taking this to its logical conclusion already, like in Utah: http://www.womensradio.com/articles/Utahs-Feticide-Law-Puts-Miscarriage-on-Trial/4967.html

The article details a Utah law on miscarriage, including a description of what acts could be prosecuted based on the language of the law.

“Some of the “knowing or intentional” acts that may be prosecuted under the law include smoking cigarettes during pregnancy, staying in an abusive relationship, refusing a Caesarean section or bed rest when instructed by a doctor or using prescription medications that are known to harm a fetus.”

So yeah. A woman who stays with a husband who abuses her because she’s afraid he’ll kill her if she leaves could get thrown in jail under this law if one of his beatings causes her to miscarry. Can’t you just feel the love of life?

But even ignoring all that, look at it this way.

Woman A has sex. She gets pregnant, and has a miscarriage. According to you, the end result is the death of a person.

Woman B has sex. She has HIV. The HIV she passes on ends up in killing the person she had sex with. The end result is the death of a person.

According to you, Woman A would be morally blameless, but Woman B would not. Yet both situations having women literally kill people by having sex. How do you claim a distinction?

John Howard:
I am serious though, I think we should prohibit embryo freezing and turn off the freezers. I can assure you all that they are NOT ensouled, they are not alive, it is not murder. Whoever is spreading the baseless lie that they are human beings with souls is making it up out of thin air, not based on the Bible, or on morality, or on biology.

If I say that an embryo which has not been implanted in a woman’s uterus is a human being with a human soul, on what grounds do you conclude that that is a baseless lie? And on what grounds (moral, biological, or Biblical) do you support your conclusion that these embryos do not have souls? It seems to me that choosing implantation as the point of ensoulment is completely arbitrary, as the embryo has not fundamentally changed from one thing to another simply because it has implanted in the uterus.

And it is a terrible position to take if it leads to religious people supporting implanting cloned or GE’d embryos rather than destroying them.

I am not absolutely certain when ensoulment occurs, but I think we have to assume that it occurs at the moment of conception, i.e. when an egg is fertilized by a sperm.

However, that does NOT lead me to the conclusion that frozen embryos (whether created by IVF, cloning, or some other means) must be rescued by being implanted and carried to term. In fact, my opinion is that such “embryo rescue” should not be done.

@Paul H
On the grounds Roivas brings up, that we don’t consider a pregnancy to have started until the woman misses her period, we don’t consider it a death of a human being if a woman doesn’t get pregnant after sex, even though it is very likely that her egg was fertilized but just didn’t implant. We do, however, often grieve for a lost life after miscarriages. But not when the woman doesn’t even miss a period, we don’t consider that a miscarriage because we don’t consider it a pregnancy. That is universal morality.

And on the grounds that the Bible says the life is in the blood, many times, and that traditional church teaching is that the baby forming in a woman’s body becomes “ensouled” after it has started to form. The circulatory system, and blood, starts forming about two weeks after conception, which happens to be around or just after it is implanted. I think God waits until there is an implanted embryo to ensoul it, why would he ensoul embryos that He knows are not going to implant?

Here are the stages: conception, which is a conceptual thing, not a physical thing, that occurs when someone conceives that a new life could conceivably be on the way, whether there is fertilization or not. That should happen after sex, every time. It’s different from fertilization, when a sperm joins an egg. And then, implantation, and then life, ensoulment and heartbeat all at the same time.

So how do you escape the conclusion that we must rescue embryos by implanting them? Please convince Betsy because I think she’s reached the opposite conclusion.

Found this here

What is a miscarriage?

Miscarriage is the loss of a pregnancy in the first 20 weeks. (In medical articles, you may see the term “spontaneous abortion” used in place of miscarriage.) About 10 to 20 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage, and more than 80 percent of these losses happen before 12 weeks.

This doesn’t include situations in which you lose a fertilized egg before a pregnancy becomes established. Studies have found that 30 to 50 percent of fertilized eggs are lost before or during the process of implantation – often so early that a woman goes on to get her period at about the expected time.

See that second paragraph? We don’t consider those miscarriages, we don’t consider those human beings with souls that die. They did not come to life, no pregnancy happened, no life happened, but a fertilized egg did happen.

John, you keep on using we. I am not sure that word means what you think that means.

@Roivas

Go ahead, threaten to prosecute miscarriage (which most women grieve over) as negligence to scare people away from limiting WILLING, PURPOSEFUL, destruction of a human in the womb, which is abortion.

1 in every 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage. Age can be a factor, but some women never miscarry, even when pregnant in their early 40s. Some women miscarry repeatedly and the doctors don’t know why. These same women might never miscarry again. The science of miscarriage is young, so to speak.

But hey, when it’s comes to protecting abortion – the FORCEFUL death of a human in the womb – no low is too low. So yeah, let’s prosecute 40 something career women for putting off childbearing, even if they are pro-choice, to keep abortion legal.

Let’s equate not paying attention to a toddler who drowns falling into a pool to conceiving a human while 35 and said human not having the natural genetic capabilities to continue growing in-utero. Let’s hyper examine what the woman ate and blame her for eating a stale bagel. Yeah, then we can cause universal panic, have women marching the streets to revoke personhood during ALL NINE months, so that the abortion industry can make even more money!

Or we could just scare women out of pregnancy with your “logic”, allowing the government to neuter people to render sex sterile. Then we can let the government farm the eggs and sperm and use an artificial womb. Then if the baby dies, there is no one to blame. This would also rid the world of “unwanted” children and maternal fatalities. Of course, this would also rid the world of families, the backbone of society, and thus bring the end of civilization, but who cares? I mean, there is no risk!

@John Howard

What is your authority to “assure me all that they are NOT ensouled”? Why should I take your word on it?

Pandora’s box was opened a long time ago. What do we do about the embryos? I don’t know. Do we force implantation? No. Artificial womb? No way. So, that leaves us with the fridge plugged in, for now, sorry.

I’m with you on the banning of IVF. Humans should be created in the fallopian tubes of their mother, by their father’s sperm through natural sexual intercourse. Said human should be allowed to gestate for as long as he/she is able without the gestation process being unnaturally aborted.

@Roivas

Any pair of parents that are carriers of CF should not be allowed to procreate by your “logic”. One in four of their children might die at the age of 30 of CF. They were negligent to allow a person to be born, live a life of love and then die at 30.

Any parents with a predisposition toward diabetes should be forbidden to procreate too. Their children will be predisposed to diabetes. Those parents are negligent to conceive, birth and raise a person who will die at age 50 due to complications because of diabetes. Who cares if the person loved them and lived a great 50 years? He/she died and its the parents fault for passing on the genes.

Any woman with a family history of breast cancer should be forbidden to have children because her daughters have a high chance of death from breast cancer. The daughter could sue her parents for negligent conception.

Quite frankly, no one should be allowed to create new life… because eventually that person will die and very often that person will die because his/her parents passed along the genetics that caused the death.

And even if the person conceived is of perfect health, he/she may get killed in a car accident by a drunk driver whose parents conceived him when they had a predisposition to alcoholism.

Seriously, no more pregnancies… or else people might die.

Deb, why would God ensoul an embryo that He knows is not going to implant? And he surely knows it’s not going to implant if it doesn’t implant. And why would he ensoul an embryo before it implants, or comes to life, even when he knows it will come to life later? Why wouldn’t he just wait to ensoul it until it comes to life? We believe the soul leaves the body when life leaves the body, right? So why believe it enters the body before life enters the body? A soul lives in life, it requires consciousness and awareness. And the Bible is clear that the life is in the blood. Life ends when the heart stops beating and begins when it starts beating.

We can’t justify keeping those embryos frozen, it’s a useless waste of electricity. It is NOT killing them to let them meet the same fate that half of naturally conceived embryos meet.

LOL about no more pregnancies or else people might die! Risk is a inherent part of pregnancy and life, which is why I don’t cite risk alone as a reason to prohibit same-sex procreation.

Yup, that’s the implications of treating a ova as a person.

Did you not read the article about the new law in Utah?

@Roivas
I mean “we” as in society, people. All of us.

@Betsy
Those are different subjects. I think God does create a perfect world, including earthquakes and floods. But I don’t think he ensouls non-living things. I think a life is necessary for a soul, and vice versa. And where there is no blood, or heartbeat, there is no life, ergo no soul.

What are your concerns with saying that embryos are not yet alive until they are implanted? Is it that it seems to allow embryonic research? Or birth control that prevents implantation? It’s true I’m saying those are not murder, but we can still object to those things on other basis, as I’ve said. I think the “it’s murder” argument is too easily dismissed for it to be effective, and winds up hurting the goal of stopping those abuses of dignity.

I have to say that this discussion is very interesting, and I’d like to point out that often on this blog, SSM is citied as a “slippery slope” towards state-sanctioned debauchery, hell-on-earth, etc. Is it really so hard to believe that giving embryos full human rights could be a “slippery slope” to women being tried for miscarriages, being banned from certain activities because they might be pregnant?

Road to hell is paved with good intentions and what-not.

@Roivas

I never said an ova is a person. The unique union between the ova and the sperm is the new human.

Yes, I could believe that the pro-death, abortion-for-profit folks causing a legal slippery slope when it comes to protecting humans in the womb. Evil knows no low.

“abortion-for-profit folks”

Yes of course. That’s what the non-profit Planned Parenthood is all about. The money. We all know how lucrative handing out free birth control, getting firebombed and having your employees harassed and killed is.

@Roivas

Before you spout the usual leftist line (or I guess in this case, after), please look up the surplus “non-profit” Planned Parenthood runs. Next, look up the percentage of this surplus that was generated by abortion.

Riddle me this.

Subsidized by PP (meaning they undercharge), an average abortion charges the patient around 200-400.

How much is a live birth? Would it surprise you to know that hospitals can bill over 10,000 in a routine birth?
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_do_child_birth_hospital_bills_cost

So if abortion providers were really about profit, why would they choose abortion services of live birth services?

And you didn’t dispute the firebombings or harassment+death of employes. If people in PP were only interested in profit, why wouldn’t they go into other businesses without risk of death?

@Roivas

Are you saying it is better economically to kill a person because giving birth is more expensive?

The person, once born, grows up and contributes to society. They work, pay taxes and keep current culture running. A live human marries, has more children so civilization can continue.

Riddle me this- Do you enjoy your high-brow morning coffee? Who is going to be your barista after we have “gone cheap” and aborted too many children because live birth is just. too. expensive. Guess it’s back to Folgers.

Secondly, when you compare abortion vs. live birth, you sound callous. Do you not have children of your own? I doubt it, because if you did, you wouldn’t sound this way. Do you have a terribly utilitarian view of all individuals? Do you look at pregnant women and see only potential dollar amounts?

Name the last abortion clinic that was fire bombed? Name the last time a pro-abortion fanatic pointed a gun at peaceful pro-lifers… oh wait it happened last year in SC:

http://www2.counton2.com/news/2010/oct/04/protesting-continues-charleston-abortion-clinic-ar-917127/

Did you know that home births run at about the same cost as abortion (without subsidies)? It is the hospital/OB malpractice insurance overhead that makes hospital live births so expensive.

The abortion industry isn’t as highly regulated as birth in hospitals. It’s actually an easier buck.