Tomorrow Mississippi will vote on a constitutional amendment that defines fertilized human eggs as persons. David French applauds and claims that "scientists are virtually unanimous in declaring that the result of conception is a human child with a distinct DNA different from his or her parents." Robert VerBruggen counters:
What’s not clear to me … is why “distinct DNA” should be the criterion by which we judge personhood for moral and legal purposes. As Reason’s Ronald Bailey has pointed out, 60 to 80 percent of human embryos — post-conception, with distinct DNA — are naturally destroyed by the woman’s body. Are we to see this as a large-scale massacre of human beings, develop drugs to prevent it from happening, and require all women who have unprotected sex to take them? Certainly, we would be willing to take measures like this if post-birth infants were dying in comparable numbers.
I went over all this at length in The Conservative Soul. My general view is that it is a little perverse to take the sacredness of life more seriously than the Almighty. Karl Smith adds another wrinkle:
Everyone is aware that it is possible for the egg to divide post conception and produce identical twins. I think most of agree that identical twins are separate people. Thus, there must be at minimum some secondary process of personification, in which the single person becomes multiple people. How does this take place? Its important because the method in which secondary personification takes place might render the “distinct DNA” theory of personification superfluous.
Dr. Science weighs in:
Human life does not "begin", it is transmitted. Human personhood is not a biological concept: it is the state of being a human being for legal and moral purposes. Laws and morality need a clear line between "person" and "not a person", biology does not care. We may need to pick a line, but that's something *we* are doing, it is not dictated by "biological facts".
Indeed. The biological line is as blurry as a Craigslist head-shot.
The Dish 