Chad, you keep ignoring the hard questions. For those interested in the question of when does human life begin, I direct you to Robert George's posts at National Review's The Corner here, here, and here. Wow what a religious nut. For the past four days or so a constant argument has been going on at The Corner between John Podhoretz in favor of embryonic stem cell research and Ramesh Ponnuru and Robert George against. By the way, Robert George is one of the nation's foremost natural law scholars and hardly qualifies as an ignorant ranting religious nut.
George points out these facts. Yes, facts. First, a blastocyst is life. It is organic material. So I ask Mr. Schuldt a question: What genus and what species is this particular life? All life can be classified (you remember: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species). How is this life classified? Prof. Blanchard is our resident expert on genetics, but George argues that genetically this life is homo sapiens. That's human. It's another question whether this is a human that bears rights (although that gets us into the slippery situation of what other humans have no rights). These are questions Chad must answer. If it is life (which is clearly is) what kind of life is it? If it is not human life, what is it? What defines "humanity"? If it is human life, does it have rights? If it does not have rights, why not? If it does not have rights, what other human beings have no rights, and why? You see, Chad, these are philosophically difficult questions, and to dismiss those who raise them as being merely religious nuts bent advancing a narrow political agenda suggests a particular level of intellectual obtuseness on your part.
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