... As with ultrasound technology--which permits parents to visualize a fetus in utero--ivf allows many patients to form an emotional attachment to a form of human life that is very early, it's true, but still life, and still human. People bond with photos of three-day-old, eight-cell embryos. They ardently wish for them to grow into children. The experience can be transforming: "I was like, 'I created these things, I feel a sense of responsibility for them,'" is how one ivf patient put it. Describing herself as staunchly pro-choice, this patient found that she could not rest until she located a person--actually, two people--willing to bring her excess embryos to term ...What a weirdo. If people want to bond with embryos they've created that's their right, but I have no greater care for any human embryo than I would for, say, a monkey embryo or a cat embryo. Nor a full grown monkey or cat, for that matter. What makes a person a person is some kind of sapience (or perhaps, consciousness). The precise nature of this is difficult to define, but it certainly requires a brain. Embryos don't have brains. They have a full set of DNA, but so does one of my live skin cells, any of which could be grown into a clone of myself with advanced enough medical technology. Point is, they aren't people unless they actually grown into people. Whether that happens naturally (in a womb) or artificially (with a cloning vat) is entirely beside the point of whether the end result is a person.
But I digress. The plan Ross quotes beforehand in that post to only federally fund research that utilizes embryos left over from IVF (which otherwise get incinerated) sounds good to me.
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