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Scientists Take Step Toward Creating Artificial Embryos (reuters.com)
An international team of scientists has moved closer to creating artificial embryos after using mouse stem cells to make structures capable of taking a crucial step in the development of life. From a report: Experts said the results suggested human embryos could be created in a similar way in future -- a step that would allow scientists to use artificial embryos rather than real ones to research the very earliest stages of human development. The team, led by Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, a professor at Britain's Cambridge University, had previously created a simpler structure resembling a mouse embryo in a lab dish. That work involved two types of stem cells and a three-dimensional scaffold on which they could grow. But in new work published on Monday in the journal Nature Cell Biology, the scientists developed the structures further -- using three types of stem cells -- enabling a process called gastrulation, an essential step in which embryonic cells begin self-organizing into a correct structure for an embryo to form.
We murder innocent tumors when we excise them from healthy flesh. If you DNA test a tumor it is decidedly human. (Hyperbole for rhetorical purposes)
A fetus is a part of a woman's body until it can transform it's metabolic rate to survive outside of the womb. Without that tranformation a fetus dies from hypothermia once removed from the womb and must be kept in an incubator until it matures into an independent organism. (Scientifically supported and provable)
It's pure hyperbole to equate abortion to murder. And if you place anti-abortion in a historic and socio-political context it comes from authoritarians that attempt to blame all social woes on impoverished single mothers. (We know social problems are more complex)
First feed, clothe, and educate the children in our poor neighborhoods and I'd be far more receptive to your ideas of what is right thinking.
Is it fair to prioritize living breathing children over a fetus? That should be obvious. Certainly it's not a mutually exclusive choice, we could protect both, but that you can't even protect one calls a lot into question.
Remain a hippocrit and I will continue to dismiss your unscientific position and questionable motives.
I think the core of the argument boils down to 'what is and what is not human', and since this is new, the one side could easily use the 'looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, therefore it's a duck' argument; doesn't matter if you assembled it molecule by molecule, if it's indistinguishable from a naturally-occurring human zygote, then it's the same regardless, and (to follow the pro-lifer thought train) therefore it could be a 'vessel' for a human 'soul', and 'experimenting' on it is therefore an atrocity and a crime against God. Keep in mind the driving force behind the pro-life movement is the idea that humans need to have as many babies as possible, regardless of the consequences, so that all the souls in Heaven can be born. That's how these people think.