What is going on here?
A few weeks ago when I started the topic, "What is life?", you refuse to debate on what is alive and what is not. Yet a few posts up, you're doing just that and on something that is blatantly alive (according to the criteria most of you set out in my Life Topic).
Let me state when the best time to extract Embryonic Stem (ES) cells are. It is when the fertilised egg has reached the blastocyst stage. As a blastocyst it is a ball of cells with no neurons, no blood vessels, no heart cells, no nothing. Just ES Cells, a few cells that will eventually form the placenta and a few cells that will form the cells in the genitalia.
If you shred this blastocyst apart, you will not cause it pain. It has no nerves. It is only alive in the sense that your individual white blood cells are alive.
Now, here is the thing.
SteveT, I remember, argued that since the fetus has a different genome from the mother, it is a separate living organism.
Need I point out to you the existence of chimeras? These are people who have mosaicism - the definition of which is having patches of cells that are genetically different from the rest. A study that was reported in the magazine, NewScientist in the past four years (can't remember which issue it was, I'm afraid) suggested that the number of chimeras is higher than originally thought due to the fact that some mosaicism is found in internal areas or is expressed elsewhere where it doesn't prove much of a problem.
So, according to that particular argument of yours, chimeras are two people.
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My point was that you can't define life by the ability to function completely on ones own. Alak is treating the fetus like an organ or a parasite, and inhuman. It's common practice to dehumanize something you dont' want to feel guilty about killing, but that's not the point.
Though I'm not liking Alak's entire argument, he was right to do so. To the mother's immune system the fetus is not an organ, but a foreign object. It is technically a parasite, as it is genetically foreign to the mother and feeds off nutrients from the mother.
If a large number of the wrong immune cells or antibodies got through to the infant, as in the case of Rhesus negative women bearing Rhesus positive children (as explained in the following source:
http://www.netdoctor.../100003104.html).
Now, when thinking about extracting ES cells from potential human beings, you must remember this one point, spontaneous abortions.
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It is estimated that up to 50% of all fertilized eggs die and are lost (aborted) spontaneously, usually before the woman knows she is pregnant. Among known pregnancies, the rate of spontaneous abortion is approximately 10% and usually occurs between the 7th and 12th weeks of pregnancy.
Source: http://www.nlm.nih.g...icle/001488.htm
So, it would seem that there is a 50-50 chance that the blastocyst you are destroying would have survived anyway. Okay, so most spontaneous abortions are due to genetic faults (and we wouldn't want the genetically faulty ES cells) so the chance is actually less than 50-50, but what is most? They don't say. Added on to the fact that htere is a 10% chance of late spontaneous abortions and you end up with the fact that only 40% of pregnacies get carried through in the first place.
With such a low success rate, the chances of you taking a blastocyst and extracting the ES cells and that particular blastocyst being one of the 40% to survive to become a human being... well, you get the idea.
And let's not forget that 40% includes those who are successfully born and will die within a few weeks, months or in the case of people who suffer from such diseases like Epidermolysis Bullosa, will live with a terribly debilitating disease that makes them wish they were never born in the first place.
