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Not surprisingly, higher SAT scores correlate with a higher eventual annual income, something to the tune of $20k/yr per 40 points in the combined SAT score (critical reading + math + writing). Assuming wages increase at the inflation rate of 3%, income is earned from ages 23 through 65, and a discount rate of 10%, the average additional lifetime earning potential of +100 points equates to $162k in present dollars.

Obviously not all eggs result in a baby; only about 10% of eggs result in a live birth. Even so, the economic value of higher SAT scores makes the $2350 look pretty trivial.

As for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine discouraging "compensation based on donors' personal characteristics"...well, they're exactly not raising my kid are they?

You're kidding, right? You're seriously trying to claim the anti-abortion crowd doesn't complain about... abortion! Wow....

Off topic but anyway. The grandparent is claiming that the fertility clinics are killing embryos that are "created" during the in vitro fertilization not during abortion. Check this in vitro fertilization stats and you will see that for every artificially fertilized child born there was many embryos that just didn't make it to the end. And probably there are many embryos waiting frozen in case the pregnancy goes wrong. If you have 4 in vitro embryos and the first pregnancy results in a child and parents decide that one child is enough, what do you? You discard the other embryos.

I wonder if the number of these embryos is not higher than the number of abortions.

Now that was a non-sequitor. Tell me, where in my post did I ever take an explicit or implicit position that it was ethical "to dismember an innocent human being in one stage of development and not in another stage"?

My objection was to terminology: an abortion is the interruption of a pregnancy, and no pregnancy has occurred. Yes, the destruction of zygotes produced as part of IVF should be the moral equivalent of abortion, if moral attitudes were determined by logical argument, but "moral equivalent" and "are the same thing" are two different relations.

As for there being "no such thing" as a fertilized egg, many reputable sources disagree. I'll concede that another term for fertilized egg common in medical jargon is "zygote".

Let's look at this from the reverse. Let's imagine that the article, after bringing up the link to breast cancer to abortion, then spent the next 451 paragraphs discussing every, possible health risk of NOT having an abortion. Whould you be in favor of that article? In case you are curious: a legal abortion is much safer than a full term pregnancy. Don't get me started on the risks to all life on this planet from overpopulation. ;-)

>A tiny clump of a few hundred cells does not a person make.

>Actually, it does.

No, it doesn't.
That's a picture of a later-stage embryo. A tiny blastocyst of a few hundred cells, as would be frozen in a test tube, looks like this on day 5 of development.

and Americans aren't microscopic.

Stem cells come from blastocysts, collections of generic human cells that have not even begun to differentiate. There are thousands of such balls of cells left over from the attempts of couples to have children via in vitro fertilization.

Stem cell researchers think they could use cells from these excess IVF embryos to save human beings from heart disease, paralysis, diabetes, etc.

Or we can listen to folks who claim these balls of cells should have the rights of citizens, and...dump them out?

Seems like the real way to "protect the weak" would be to protect sick and dying Americans from the fantasy that a frozen ball of generic cells is a human being.

A peek in the future: in an embarassing statement the Mars scientist admit that what was previously thought as evidence for great Marsian flood (topomap.jpg) is, actually, the sperm sample (sperm.jpg) of one of the scientists.