Question

1. Is a three to five day old embryo deserving of moral respect and protection?

2. If unwanted embryos in fertility clinics are going to be destroyed anyway, why not harvest their stem cells first and reap the potential benefits?

3. Should pro-life organizations such as Catholic health care institutions, participate in research on ESC lines if doing so would not entail the destruction of any more embryos?

4. If we don't use these unwanted embryos in fertility clinics for research, how do we respond to those patients, now suffering from diseases, who might have benefited from such research?

Answer 1

1.Yes, As Embryos are whole human beings, at the early stage of their maturation, Some grant that the human embryo is a human organism, but deny that this means it is a being deserving of full moral respect.

2.It would be wrong to destroy such embryos in research; however, not all embryos are wanted. We argue that it is, with the consent of the parents, morally permissible to conduct destructive research on embryos that are not wanted perhaps because the reproductive wish of the parents has been fulfilled or abandoned. Moreover, we also argue that it is morally permissible to produce embryos specifically for research. Our arguments are intended to apply only to embryos not fetuses or fetal tissue and we assume that an embryo becomes a fetus eight weeks after fertilization.

  Embryonic stem cells are usually harvested shortly after fertilization (within 4-5 days) by transferring the inner cell mass of the blastocyst into a cell culture medium so that the cells can be multiplied in a laboratory.Stem cells are unspecialized cells of the human body. They are able to differentiate into any cell of an organism and have the ability of self-renewal. Stem cells exist both in embryos and adult cells. There are several steps of specialization. Developmental potency is reduced with each step, which means that a unipotent stem cell is not able to differentiate into as many types of cells as a pluripotent one.

3.Yes, pro-life organizations such as Catholic health care institutions, participate in research on ESC. A Catholic medical research institute has claimed some successes in providing alternatives to research that harvest cells from human embryos but it says such research needs more resources to compete. A Catholic medical research institute has claimed some successes in providing alternatives to research that harvest cells from human embryos but it says such research needs more resources to compete. The Catholic Church is only against some forms of Embryonic Stem Cell Research (ESCR) that entail the destruction of human embryos. Stem cells are cells that develop very early in the human embryo after fertilization.

4.Thousands of embryos that cannot be used for fertility treatment are discarded as medical waste each year by IVF clinics. Embryos are discarded for a variety of reasons. Some do not develop normally, while others are found to carry genetic defects that cause serious disease.