Dear old Bill, getting a bit senile in his old age. Or, does he really, really believe that human embryos do not become little babies until they are fertilised? Because, if they were fertilised, it would be a bad thing to experiment on them. But "unfertilised" embryos - hey, that's ok!
Seen on WDTPRS & Creative Minority Report.
Did he perhaps think stem-cell research was done on ova?
ReplyDeleteHysterical.
Well, not really.
You can't make a chicken without breaking a few eggs, or something like that.
ReplyDeleteOh Lucyna
ReplyDeleteYou must make a few allowances for old Bill.
He is a democrat after all.
And we know how the MSM makes allowances for Democrats!
Now, test tube babies.
ReplyDeleteI always wondered how you made those when you know what is too big to fit into a test tube :)
Oh no, the mental image!
ReplyDeleteWhile funny, to be fair to Bill Clinton, he seems to just jumbled his terminology. If you swap every time he said "fertilized" with "implanted", it makes biological and logical sense, if not morally.
ReplyDeleteOf more interest would be that position - if Clinton thinks an embryo is not human unless implanted.
Clinton should be asked to clarify his 'fertilization' remarks, and if he does say he meant implantation, he needs to explain what changes between a pre- and post-implantation embryo to 'change it' into a human.
This is particularly relevant to IVF, as claiming humanity starts at implantation would counter most objections to IVF.
Perhaps Obama can help with the answers, especially if his Surgeon-General can't!!!
Matt's position is effectively that humanity starts are implantation (segmentation to be precise - both occur around the same point). Unlike Clinton he has an argument and basis for his position. He gets into some of it here: Some Thoughts on Human Embryonic Stem-cell Research
ReplyDeleteI think he is wrong as I do not get the significance of continual metaphysical identity. To me if something has continual genetic identity, clearly originated from a single cell and was in a contained environment which would rule out cloning I don't see the problem. Matt says it is a logical problem that if B and C originated from A you must be able to say that B is identical with C (in the sense that they are the same person not that they look the same) and as you cannot you cannot say they originated from A. (I probably have restated this wrong - it is based on Don Marquis's argument) He is speaking of the fact a conceptus can split from one entity into two or three or four and sees the same problem with the phenomena of recombination - apparently multiple conceptii can recombine back into one pre-segmentation.
Like I said, I don't get the significance of it, I sense intuitively that there is an answer that if I could just understand the force of the objection I could grasp (which is I know a stupid thing to state out loud but is something that I know is usually reliable to me). As such, I oppose many practices of IVF, abortifacient contraception and human embryonic stem-cell research.