I heard an interview on the Imus program with a senator (not sure which one; I think they are interchangeable, like Legos). This guy gave a reasonably nice overview of the technology behind stem cells, along with mild rebukes to the religious nut jobs who think that cloning is against God’s law or something (no offense to the religious — I categorize anyone who holds inflexible views on anything as a nut job, including myself).
So anyway, the argument put forth by these people — as I understand it — is that once a sperm fertilizes an egg you’ve got a person. So flushing that single cell down the toilet constitutes murder. Now my thinking on this is that you have a potential person. That is, you only get a person if the environment is just right. Like, say, that fertilized egg is hooked up with a comfy womb room. No womb, no person.
So if you follow my thinking on this, we have the ability to create potential people based on our current technological understanding. So mad scientist can yoink sperms and eggs out of people and smoosh them together and turkey-baster them into willing wombs. And according to the religious folk, the technological mooshing results in a real person and so if you flush this person instead of turkey-bastering them you are a murderer. But this issue never would have arisen without the technological innovation.
So what happens when we look into the future and think about how technology will impact reproduction in the future. I’m talking cloning, baby. So suddenly the technology pops up that allows mad scientists to create people from any cell. Like, they could take a hair and make a million babies from it. Does that mean that in the future brushing your hair makes you a murderer? Because you just killed a thousand cells that could have been people-ized. What if you get poison ivy? Would the religious people say that you can’t scratch because you are killing the unborn?
I think that people should stop treating potentials as people, and worry more about how to stop realized people from acting like jerks.