heh, I love this rhetorical device. The crazy thing about not wanting to fund stem cell research is that the government pays for 80% of all new drug creations, we are already disposing of thousands of stem cells a week. So if you prescribe to the ridiculous notion that we should be protecting zygotes why are you not going after the mothers and fathers who have hundreds of zygotes made in the process of artificial insemination, but ultimately end up using one or two. By the logic expressed by wumpus and others in this thread these parents are guilty of murder for daring to have one child, while the other hundreds die. Of course it takes a ridiculous rhetorical device like Hamfist's to point this out, but the reality is that we THROW AWAY thousands of zygotes a day, if they are actually people (cough cough) would their lives not be better served providing people with parkinsons, diabetes, traumatic spinal cord injuries, and others with hope?

For me at, least the answer, unless you are an unbelievably cruel bastard, or at least horribly uneducated about the realities of zygote death in the US, is yes of course we should.

I don't know how the hypotheticals offered establish that a zygote is not a life, though.

You could add the wrinkle that the embryo is the person who shall cure cancer and the 2 year old is the high school shooter #6. Who do you save now? The question that is being missed is "Are they both 'living beings'?

As anyone who has seen ultrasounds can tell you, at a certain point in gestation egg+sperm become something that is unmistakably human. And abortion, whether or not you believe it is murder, it is a cessation of life. At the end of the day, you are harvesting cells from the products of killings.

I suppose that there is a idealistic 'greater good' argument espoused by Fox and others, but it is morally very murky.

Which would be my answer as well.

Now let's suppose that it was a hundred petri dishes, each stacked on top of the last, and that for whatever reason, each dish holds a thousand zygotes. Would you make the same choice? If so, why did you decide to sacrifice a hundred thousand lives for the one?

"If a fire breaks out in a fertility clinic and you only have time to save either a petri dish full of zygotes or a two-year old child, which do you save?"

The child of course, it's a no brainer.

As Wumpus believes that a human life begins at the moment of fertilization, please oblige me in answering the following hypothetical question...

If a fire breaks out in a fertility clinic and you only have time to save either a petri dish full of zygotes or a two-year old child, which do you save?

Jeremy1967 you did exactly what I expected. Dehumanization. Is a person any less of a person becaue they have one cell? Everyone here is still just cells. If you want to break it down scientifically then a zygote is a single cell person and an adult is the fully developed collection of cells but sill, they are both the same human being. Also a human infant can't survive any longer than a human zygote without outside help so where is the difference there? That is why I think the science community shouldn't be allowed to use embryos in stem cell research.

"Sperm + Egg = Human"

Well, technically sperm + egg combine to create a zygote - the combining of two haploid cells into a single diploid cell. From this diploid, in time, will grow a human but to suggest that a zygote = human is a bit of a stretch. I think when most people think of a "human" they tend to picture a fully developed, thinking, breathing being and not a mass of cells that could exist in a petri dish. If you want to start talking about whether or not that same zygote has a soul, well now you're stepping into the realm of religion which has no place in science and should not be the basis upon which government makes decisions.

"If you believed that the earth was flat, does that mean the earth is flat?"
The problem with that line is that the Earth has been proven to be, in fact round. It has also been proven that an egg that has been fertalized with a sperm has the same potential to become a human being as any other fertialized egg that the egg and sperm do not possess seperately. Both zygote cells are in fact living cells but they don't have the potential to become living human being until they are combined i.e. fertalized.

"If you're against ESC research because you believe life begins at conception, then do you believe that conception can occur in a test tube? I believe conception occurs in the womb, not a test tube."

That's a perfectly valid and respectable position to take. If that's your belief then you're entitled to it. But hypotheticlly speaking, if an embryo in created invitro and grown into an independantly living infant in a labratory, is that that not also considered life as opposed to an invitro fertilization that was implanted into a uterus that also results in an infant? Bear in mind that this is a hypothetical situation and only one part of the growing debate of bioethics.

To reitterate for amxcvbcv and Dag, I don't subscribe to the Catholic belief that "every sperm is sacred", because by themselves, a sperm and egg cannot create life seperately, but the human species was created/evolved (pick one or both)in a way that an egg and a sperm are combined expressly for the sole purpose of creating life and propogating the species and in my opinion, not for experimentation.