2013 marek vácha. in the proper biological sense, „life“ does not begin anew with each...

2013Marek Vácha

in the proper biological sense, „life“ does not begin anew with each generation. The sperm and the egg are moving, metabolizing cells and are in fact biologically alive

(Gilbert, S.C., Tyler, A.L., Zackin, E.J., (2005) Bioethics and the New Embryology. Sinauer Associates, Inc. W.H. Freeman & comp. Sunderland, MA U.S.A. p. 31)

Personhood

in rural Japan: when an infant utters its first cry

northern Ghana: 7 days after birth Ayatal aborigines: personhood is not

obtained until the child is named – and naming occurs 2 or 3 years after birth

native americans in Mojava desert: human life begins for children who live long enough to be put to the mother´s breast


Defininition of Human Embryo

A human embryo is a discrete entity that has arisen from either:

(i) the first mitotic division when fertilization of a human oocyte by a human sperm is complete or

(ii) any other process that initiates organized development of a biological entity with a human nuclear genome or altered human nuclear genome that has the potential to develop up to, or beyond, the stage at which the primitive streak appears,

and has not yet reached 8 weeks of development since the first mitotic division.

Empirical Functionalism

„person“

Ontological Personalism

„person“

Aquinas

„the father provide the form, the mother the matter. The male provide the seed; the female the soil.“

...„every sperm is sacred“

This is a 17th Century drawing of a homunculus, a "little man" in a fetal position, in this case living inside the head of a sperm cell.

Biological Perspective

Day 1 Day 4 Day 14 Day 15 Day 30 or so

1876: Oscar Hertwig and Herman Fol independently demonstrated in sea urchins sperm entry into egg and the union of the two cells´nuclei

Day 7

"If the embryo loss that accompanies natural procreation were the moral equivalent of infant death, the pregnancy would have to be regarded as a public health crisis of epidemic proportions: alleviating natural embryo loss would be a more urgent moral cause that abortion, in vitro fertilization, and stem cell research combined." (John Opitz)

argument against: isn´t it a kind of naturalistic fallacy?

Personhood

you become human at fertilization in this "genetic view of human life, a new

individůual is ceated at fertilization, when the genes from two parents combine to from a new genome with unique properties.

This is a view that can be maintained with or without religious belief, and it is a position held by some scientists.


Personhood: at fertilization

An abnormality may occur. There has been little or no discussion by anyone about the fact that the majority of meetings of sperm and egg do not result in a normal human individual. Human reproduction is an extremely inefficient process. Only about one in four, or maybe five, meeting of eggs and sperm in normal reproduction results in the birth of normal individual. In studies of early spontaneous abortions, it can be shown that two-thirds of the abortions are associated with aneuploidy (abnormal numbers) at the chromosome level. (...) Do these defective meetings create persons?

Jones, W.H., (2012) Personhood Revisited. Reproductive Technology, Bioethics, Religion and the Law. Langdon Street Press. Minneapolis, MN. p.146

Personhood

you become human at gastrulation this "embryologic" view proposes that a

human receives individual identity around day 14, when the embryo undergoes gastrulation

it is at this point that the embryo can no longer form twins, and it is here that the cells begin the process of diggerentioation into the specific cell types of the new body.


Personhood

the acquisition of the human EEG pattern is when you become

this "neurological" view of human life looks for symmetry between the ways we define human life and human death death: loss of the cerebral EEG life: acquisition of EEG (at about 24 - 27 weeks)

= the end of the second trimester just as a pile of unconnected microchips cannot

function as a computer, the unconnected neurons of fetal brain lack the capacity for conscious function prior the week 24.


Personhood

you became human at or near birth human life begins when an individual has

become fully independent of the mother one advantage of such moments is that

they are well-defined, public and obvious: the crowning of the head, the cutting of the

umbilical cord, the first brath, or the first cry

Personhood

heartbeat, quickening, brain waves, viability among others, have been considered as the

events that bestow personhood, and therefore societal protection.

Jones, W.H., (2012) Personhood Revisited. Reproductive Technology, Bioethics, Religion and the Law. Langdon Street Press. Minneapolis, MN. p.12

Viability: a critique

viability a fetus would be a person in a major hospital

in the United States but not in a developing country without sophisticated medical facilities.

Extrauterine fetuses

The human brain keeps growing throughout childhood, making millions of new nerv cells each day

if humans were born at the same stage of brain development as their ape relatives, a baby would probably be born at around 18 months, and its head would be far too large to pass through the birth canal.

So it could be said that we spend the first few years of our lives as „extrauterine fetuses“, totally dependent on parental care.


Human EmbryoLuis Santamaría, U.A.M., Spain

Human embryos are not: some other type of animal organism, like a pre-

human entity neither are they a part of an organism, like a heart,

a kidney, or a skin cells nor again are they a disorganized aggregate, a

mere clump of cells awaiting some magical transformations

rather, a human embryo is a whole living member of the species Homo sapiens in the earliest of his or her natural development

Human EmbryoLuis Santamaría, U.A.M., Spain

Human embryos are, from the very beginning, human beings, sharing an identity with, though younger than, human beings they will grow up to become

Embryo science, Embryo technology, Embryo ethicsLuis Santamaría, U.A.M., Spain Embryo science

tells us what the embryos are and when they begin

Embryo technologies represent the abilities of researchers to do

things to or with embryos they can make embryos in lab, by IVF or by

cloning they can keep embryos alive in the lab whether

in culture, or indefinitely by freezing they can destroy these embryos

Embryo science, Embryo technology, Embryo ethicsLuis Santamaría, U.A.M., Spain Embryo ethics

are such manipulation morally right? it is not uncommon to hear embryo

researchers claim that only science should have a say what science does, and that ethics, religion and politics have no business in the concerns of science

it is true that moral philosophy cannot say what embryo is nor has anything to say about what can be done with an embryo

Embryo science, Embryo technology, Embryo ethicsLuis Santamaría, U.A.M., Spain

but science has nothing to say about what we ought to do, even in the domain of science

Geoffrey Chu, 2003

In the early phases of this continuum, we casually redefine 'human' to suit our personal agendas. (…) Emergence of the embryonic streak on day 14 is another unfortunate arbitrary definition of who is human.

Those who have lost part of their cortex from a stroke or Alzheimer's Disease are no less human than they were beforehand.

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118897797/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

Arguments For

absence of a distinctive humanoid appearance

absence of sentience

Arguments For

The demise of the unimplanted embryos would be analogous to the loss of numerous embryos wasted in the normal in vivo attempts to generate a child. It is estimated that over 50 percent of eggs successfully fertilized during unprotected sexual intercourse fail to implant, or do not remain implanted, in the uterine wall, and are shed soon thereafter, before a diagnosis of pregnancy could be made.

Any couple attempting to conceive a child tacitly accepts the sad fact of such embryonic wastage as the perfectly tolerable price to be paid for the birth of a (usually) healthy child.

Current procedures to initiate pregnancy with laboratory fertilization thus differ from the natural process in that what would normally be spread over four or five monthes in vivo is compressed into a single effort, using all at once a four or five months suply of eggs.

Kass, L.R., (2002) Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity. Encounter Books, New York, London. p. 88

Arguments Against

The natural loss of embryos in early pregnancy cannot in itself be a warrant for deliberately aborting them or for invasively experimenting on them in vitro, any more than stillbirths could be a justification for newborn infanticide.

There many things that happen naturally that we ought not do deliberately.

Arguments against

the zygote and early embryonic stages are clearly alive they metabolize, respire and respond to changes

in the environment; they grow and divide

the blastocyst is an organic whole, self-developing, genetically unique and distinct from the sperm and egg something new and alive in a different sense

comes into being with fertilization Kass, L.R., (2002) Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity. Encounter Books, New York, London. p. 87

Arguments against

Even Dr. Robert Edwards had apparently stumbled over this truth, perhaps inadvertently, in his remark about Louise Brown:

"The last time I saw her, she was just eight cells in a test-tube. She was beautiful then, and she´s still beautiful now!"

Kass, L.R., (2002) Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity. Encounter Books, New York, London. p. 88

Arguments against

I myself would agree that a blastocyst is not, in a full sense, a human being, or what the current fashion calls, a person

Yet, at the same time, I must acknowledge that the human blastocyst is human in origin potentially a mature human being, if all goes well in vitro blastocyst is exactly what a human being is

at that stage of human development. Kass, L.R., (2002) Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity. Encounter Books, New York, London.

p. 88

Arguments Against

… the intentional production of fetuses for research is tantamount to murder, and uses humen life simply as a means rather than as an end

Arguments Against

„A human embryo is a whole living member of the species homo sapiens in the earliest stage of his or her natural development. Unless denied a suitable environment, an embryonic human being will by directing its own integral organic functioning develop himself or herself to the next more mature developmental stage, i.e., the fetal stage. The embryonic, fetal, infant, child, and adolescent stages are stages in the development of a determinate and enduring entity—a human being—who comes into existence as a single cell organism and develops, if all goes well, into adulthood many years later.“

http://www.cbrinfo.com/cloning.html

Arguments Against

In this way, the practice of multiple embryo transfer implies a purely utilitarian treatment of embryos. One is struck by the fact that, in any other area of medicine, ordinary professional ethics and the healthcare authorities themselves would never allow a medical procedure which involved such a high number of failures and fatalities.

6th dayin vitro

24+cca 168 daysoutside the body of the mother

"ectogenesis"so far beyond the reach of science

Embryos

Abortion Embryonic Stem Cell Research

the fetuses are unwanted, usually the result of "accidental" conception

the federal guidelines research (USA) permitt studies conducted on the not-at-all viable aborted fetus, such research merely takes advantage of available "products" of abortions

wanted and deliberately created the fate of these embryos

is not in conflict with the wishes of the pregnant women

deliberate production of embryos for the express purpose of experimentation (in some cases)

Embryos

Abortion Embryonic Stem Cell Research

not-at-all viable pre-viable the blastocyst is possibly

salvageable

2013 marek vácha. in the proper biological sense, „life“ does not begin anew with each...

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