First, Jacobs carried out a survey, supposedly representative of all Americans, by seeking potential participants on the Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing marketplace and accepting all 2, respondents who agreed to participate. He found that most of these respondents trust biologists over others — including religious leaders, voters, philosophers and Supreme Court justices — to determine when human life begins.
Then, he sent 62, biologists who could be identified from institutional faculty and researcher lists a separate survey, offering several options for when, biologically, human life might begin.
That result is not a proper survey method and does not carry any statistical or scientific weight. That may well be because there is neither scientific consensus on the matter of when human life actually begins nor agreement that it is a question that biologists can answer using their science.
Scott Gilbert , the Howard A. Schneiderman Professor of Biology emeritus at Swarthmore College, is the author of the standard textbook of developmental biology. He has identified as many as five developmental stages that, from a biological perspective, are all plausible beginning points for human life. Biology, as science knows it now, can tell these stages apart, but cannot determine at which one of these stages life begins.
The first of these stages is fertilization in the egg duct, when a zygote is formed with the full human genetic material. If genetic material alone makes a potential human being, then when we shed skin cells — as we do all the time — we are severing potential human beings.
The second plausible stage is called gastrulation, which happens about two weeks after fertilization. At that point, the embryo loses the ability to form identical twins — or triplets or more. The embryo therefore becomes a biological individual but not necessarily a human individual. Disappearance of this pattern is part of the legal standard for human death ; by symmetry, perhaps its appearance could be taken to mark the beginning of human life.
Sound health policy is best based on scientific fact and evidence-based medicine. The best health care is provided free of governmental interference in the patient-physician relationship.
Personal decision- making by women and their doctors should not be replaced by political ideology. We urge you to call on us to provide expert factual explanation of issues related to women's health. Bulk pricing was not found for item. Please try reloading page. Besides the obvious issue of abortion there would be a host of genetic and biological dilemmas--surrogate mothering, eugenics, test-tube babies, and all the tangled rest we haven't confronted yet.
If we treated the fetus as a human being, how would that change things? What would happen? Can we imagine it? I am not impartial to this. Anne Herbert, the gifted writer and former editor of this magazine who inspired this project although she has nothing to do with it or my ideas suggests that if we want peace we must imagine a world without killing in all its particulars as a first step.
I would like us to imagine a world without killing the unborn, where the fetus was treated as a human being. What would the consequences be? I'd like the zealous pro-lifers to imagine that, the consequences of no abortions; and all the women and men in the many details of their lives, what not killing the unborn would mean to them, how it would hurt, the trouble and pain it would cause. I would like the pro-abortion choosers to imagine a world where the fetus was treated as a human being, where the misery of an unwanted child was not dealt with by killing the child.
Suppose there's this place where fetuses are treated as humans, so when one is conceived unintentionally, or by force, or by research, it's taken care of, it's dealt with, things are changed at a great price to grant it its existence. It takes courage to even imagine that. Can you see it? It's sometimes hard to see. Watching women who are unfairly overburdened with the responsibility of kids makes it hard to imagine. I think it's wretched that so many men deny responsibility for the fetus they coinitiate.
Abandoning this responsibility brings wretchedness to the women who are wrongly asked to deal with the fetus's compounding demands alone, and it too often brings fatal wretchedness to the unborn fetus. If you regarded the fetus as a human being how would it change your approach to sex? I think considering the fetus a human being would keep our definitions of "human' wide.
We would be less likely to narrow our acceptance of who is human, to cast away those not formed like us. As it is, we find it particularly tempting to eliminate those who don't meet our specifications white, extra-bright, no defects while they are yet voiceless and unseen, whereas once they are born we are obliged to accept and adapt to their otherness.
Imagine a world where the misshapened were not permitted to live, where everyone was "normal. I imagine not only less violence against the unborn, but more regard for it. One of the consequences of treating the fetus as a human being is that we would treat is as something with its own inherent value, not just something that had potential.
It would have worth and meaning merely because it is human, not because of what it has done, not because of what it will do, but because it is. Usually we fall into thinking of a pregnant women and her fetus as being adversaries battling over exclusive rights, the right of a woman to control her body versus the right of the fetus to live long enough to control hers. I am trying to imagine what it would be like if we choose to help both the fetus and the mother, if we gave them both all the support they needed to live and live well, if we decided they both were valuable and important.
What would that mean to us as a society? If we choose to use all our resources, anything it took to make that happen, what do you think it would be like? I think it would be a royal pain.
It would cost a lot. The consequences of treating the fetus as a human being means life for the soon-to-be born and a lot of trouble for the rest of us. It's not convenient.
It means sacrifice and going out of our way. It means treating not only the fetus as a human being but also women and the handicapped babies that would be born, treating them as human beings too.
It probably also means treating out enemies as human beings, but all that suddenly sounds so difficult that I understand again why we shy away from it, especially when we are in the embrace of one we love.
There are many immediately difficult consequences no matter how we treat the fetus. What do you think the consequences of treating it as a human would be? That's my rap. I'm sure there would be all kinds of effects, unpleasant and wonderful, that I haven't considered, but you might have. I'm looking for concrete examples of consequences. Details we shouldn't overlook while we imagine. Send them to me at Whole Earth. The consequences would be that, for the first time in this country since the invasion of the white man, there would be no group of human beings who are lawfully the victims of those with power.
The consequences would be a country where no one's life is considered disposable, and all human beings would share equal protection under the law. The consequences would be true equality and not an atmosphere in which rights are designated to a favored majority, or minority, by those who are unfortunately in the position to make such determinations. Whether we could live with such startling consequences remains to be seen, since they are not consequences we have imposed upon ourselves as a nation since its inception.
A truly terrifying thought to pursue is rather: "What are the consequences of NOT treating the fetus as a human being, and what is such a perverse mentality the consequence of? Every human being now alive as well as every human being that walked the face of the earth is or was at one time a fetus.
And that should lead to a more relevant if more somber thought: What are the consequences of not treating the fetus as a human being? History provides answers enough to such a question if we expand the question to its proper form. What is the consequence of some people treating other people as if they were not human beings?
Up until the middle of the last century, the judiciary of this country specified that blacks were property, not people. If the issue had been debated then, and it was, proponents of slavery would have predicted the economic collapse of the South as the direct consequence of treating the Negro as if he were human.
The South did suffer an economic collapse as a result of not treating blacks like humans, but the collapse was a consequence of the Civil War. Had they voluntarily emancipated the slaves, the war might have been avoided. The same point could be made about the Third Reich, Ruin for Germany was the ultimate consequence of not treating the Jew as a human being. Should we expect a different fate? All Jews and all blacks were once fetuses. Abortion simply substitutes ageism for racism.
Stage of development becomes the criterion whereby people are selected for extermination. Houses divided don't stand. The ultimate consequence of not treating human beings like human beings is ruin. It happened with blacks and Jews in the past; it's happening with the unborn, half of whom presumably are female, now.
But what about the women?
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