Except for this one:
Posted on 11/26/2007 4:11:17 PM PST by wagglebee
LOS ANGELES, November 26, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Human beings, being mammals, do not lay eggs. This fact, known to most school children, is frequently forgotten by those in the media reporting on advancements in embryo and cloning research. The latest example of media misrepresentation on embryo research comes from Saturday's Los Angeles Times which ran the headline, "Abortion opponents push for 'personhood' for eggs."
The Los Angeles Times reporter examines pending bills in several states that would confer legal personhood on the unborn child from the first moment of conception. Nicholas Riccardi cites efforts in Colorado, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana and Georgia to bring ballot initiatives forward that would recognise the existence of a human person from the moment of conception.
Riccardi quotes Belinda Bulger, deputy legal director for the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) who complained that the "type of language," in the Colorado ballot initiative is deceptive.
In Colorado, should the effort succeed to bring a ballot initiative forward in 2008, voters would be asked if the constitution should "include any human being from the moment of fertilization as 'person' ... in those provisions of the Colorado constitution relating to inalienable rights, equality of justice, and due process of law."
Ironically, Bulger said the language of the question "may be scarier than an outright ban. First, because it can be hard for people to understand what it's doing, and second, because it would be far further reaching."
Pro-life advocates have often pointed to the misrepresentation in media of terminology surrounding cloning and embryo research. Terms such as "pre-embryo", "balls of stem cells", or "fertilized eggs" are commonly used to indicate what human embryologists have defined scientifically as a human embryo in the earlier stages of development.
Despite what many refer to as the "debate" over when a human being begins to exist, the facts have been known for more than a hundred and thirty years. In 1875, the German zoologist Oskar Hertwig showed definitively that penetration of a spermatozoon into an ovum was the beginning of independent life and that the terms "conception" and "fertilization" are therefore interchangeable terms.
Human embryologists have shown that once fertilization has taken place, neither the male nor female sex cells (often misnamed "eggs") continue to exist.
Dianne Irving, a scientist and ethicist who has written extensively on the subject, says that misdirection by the media in terminology has enabled much of the enormous gains in legalizing destructive research on human embryos in the last ten years.
In her 2003 article, "Playing God by Manipulating Man: The Facts and Frauds of Human Cloning", Irving wrote of "the purposeful and massive manipulation of language, science, ethics, legislation and politicians" that has led to the creation of such legislation.
"We are being led into 'believing' that what are being manipulated and dissected in petri dishes in laboratories across the world during human cloning experiments are not really innocent living human beings who will be killed in the process. Rather they are 'just a bunch of stem cells'."
The left has a long history of redefining terms to fit their agenda.
Pro-Life Ping
Freepmail wagglebee or little jeremiah to subscribe or unsubscribe from the moral absolutes ping list.
FreeRepublic moral absolutes keyword search
Except for this one:
I used to love to hear “mass of undifferentiated tissue.” Let’s just say that the people using the term weren’t biology majors.
“mass of undifferentiated tissue.”
Contestant #2: “The question, Alex, is What is a Lefty”
Alex: No, Contestant #1?
Contestant #1: “What is a liberal?”
Alex: No, Contestant #3?
Contestant #3: “What is a Democrat?”
Alex: Sorry, the answer was “What is Hillary”.
Great book on that topic:
“Dehumanizing the Vulnerable: When Word Games Take Lives”
Covers abortion, slavery, Nazi Holocaust and more. Important history.
The term “fertilization” is a term of art. As soon as the head of the sperm penetrates the egg, an explosiion of genetic material take place. It needs to be likened to a chemical reaction. When hydrogen and oxygen combine, one gets a new substance, water. When sperm and ovum combine, one gets an embryo.
“I used to love to hear “mass of undifferentiated tissue.” Let’s just say that the people using the term weren’t biology majors.”
..as a bio person, and fu**ing how.
Confusing eggs with embryos
confusing bacteria with viruses
confusing darwinian evolution with lamarckian evolution...
they can’t be trusted
Who wrote it?
Short beaked echidna.
Monotreme ping!
Hey Jim! "Monotreme" is not in your spell-checker! Nor is "echidna". What's up with this crummy site? ;)
As I understand it, an unfertilized chicken egg is one cell. Just like an unfertilized human egg only much much larger. If someone knows differently, please tell me. And once the chicken egg is fertilized, it then becomes an unhatched chicken.
Some biologist tell me, please, if this is incorrect. The shell is made of calcium, not a bunch of cells containing calcium. The white is nothing but protein, no cells. The yellow also has no cells. The chicken makes one every day, if an egg were more than one cell, how would that miracle of multiplication of cells take place?
Dianne Irving, a scientist and ethicist
Go Knuckles!
Be it ever so humble, from the moment of fertilization it is an individual human being.
I spent more time than I care to replicate arguing about abortion yesterday. The implications of saying the fertilized egg is a human life on par with someone walking the streets are huge.
I’m pretty deep in the pro-life side, and I don’t believe that. If you try to make it the basis of law, you will have some very unpopular consequences. For example, if delivery of the fetus endangers the mother, then logically you should kill the mother to save the infant - who has more of his/her life ahead than the mother. You should also prosecute any woman asking for an abortion for first degree murder.
“When sperm and ovum combine, one gets an embryo.”
The fertilized egg is not an embyo until the first cleaving takes place. A fertilized egg is defined as a single cell with genetic material of both parents. An embryo is multicellular and the parent’s genetic material has been copied and distributed to two or more cells.
The cleaving is a manifestation of an action that is occuring. I won’t push the anaology too far, but like when enough h20 molecules have combined so that a visible drop is formed.
By William Brennan.
I'm glad to be able to allay your anxieties about this one. First of all, maternal death due to childbirth is extremely rare, and can nearly 100% of the time be avoided by skilled pregnancy management,including possibly C-section, if necessary before full term, as explained by Feminists for Life.
A pregnant mother and baby both fare better, medically, when they are treated as natural allies and the doctor aims at safety for both; deliberately killing a patient (including a mother!) is of course never an ethical nor a medically necessary option.
It was true 30 years ago,and it's true today: anyone who says one patient or the other "must" die in a childbirth situation is clearly someone either unwilling or unable to practice modern obstetrics.
"You should also prosecute any woman asking for an abortion for first degree murder."
There's no "must" here at all. Every state in the USA had laws protecting unborn life 40 years ago; none of them, to the best of my knowledge, prosecuted the woman, whose testimony, on a practical level, was needed in order to successfully convict the abortionist.
This is the nearest approximation you can make to justice in this sort of case. It is akin to plea-bargaining in order to get a small-timer to implicate the bigger criminal: it might not be "perfect" justice but we can safely leave "perfect" justice in God's hands: prosecuting only the abortionist is the way these laws have always operated.
By the way, the laws in many states still retain fragmentary elements of "legal personhood" which existed pre-Roe. For instance, in some states an unborn child can inherit property, can be a named beneficiary in insurance coverage, can be a party in a lawsuit, can be recognized as a patient in his own right, --- all rights which will certainly be more secure when the law gets its head back on straight.
You raise some interesting points. Thanks for the polite reply - I didn’t get many of those last night!
PING
S’Awright!
William Brennan
Yes.
My current favorite is the designation of an embryo not yet implanted in a human body as merely a mass of undifferentiated cells. This particular purposed lie completely negates the cell differentiation begun at morula stage which leads to the newly conceived LIFE being able to implant in the uterine lining (optimally; it has occurred in other locations, like a liver, and including extra-corporeal uterine tissue at Harvard research). It also negates the differentiation the embryo does to build the first ORGAN for survival, even brfore differentiation of the inner cell mass has occurred.
“The cleaving is a manifestation of an action that is occuring. I won’t push the anaology too far, but like when enough h20 molecules have combined so that a visible drop is formed.”
I have no idea what that means. My point is that an embryo is multi-cellular by definition. Once an unfertilized egg becomes fertilized, it can correctly be defined during that limited period of time as a “fertilized egg” until it splits into 2 or more separate cells.
I am simply pointing out that your definition is based on appearances. But one the ovum has been “pierced” it ceases very quicky to be “Just” an ovum. What you call “
Fertilized ovum is “Just” the earliest stage of an embryo, just as the embryo is an earlier stage of the “fetus. “ The split into two cells is simply a sign of progress. I guess you can start the whole thing without the intervention of a sperm, so that the embryo is simply the clone of the female. But something has to start it. A moment before there thing was not in motion, was not developing, a moment after it was. Eventually it will “stop” and cascade down into dissolution. Even this is not as definite as the first.
BTTT
Thanks.
(Hi, how are you?)
Doing fine. Worried about the enomony.
Heh. I hear that.
Yes!!
They were EITHER blatant liars OR woefully ignorant individuals.
In either case, I wouldn't want to rely on their medical advice.
"Length of life remaining," per se, won't determine who should be saved.
We don't really know whether the mother or her unborn child would have more years ahead. Sadly, many parents outlive one or more of their children.
And what about a deadly situation (fire? flood?) in which a mother of two children, one who is a newborn and one who is 7 years old, can save only one child?
Should she use "logic" to save the newborn because the newborn would have more years ahead than the 7 year old?
Orwell called in "New Speak" in "1984". We've not heeded the warning.
I have heard the words spoken by a nurse, an intelligent woman, and RN. I did not know what to say at the time: this was in, say, 1975. Didn’t seem right, so I looked it up in a textbook on embryology. I concluded she knew nothing about DNA, that she had been taught by another nurse who also knew nothing.
Thanks for the thread wagglebee,here’s a bump.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
