Paean

a joyous exultant song or hymn

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As I spoke about in class today, I don't see an ethical differences between individual sperm and egg and their combination--the moment of conception, where the individual parts wrap together, begin to multiply, and send the cells on the way to being human. As difficult as it was for me to initially separate myself from the natural sympathy that comes from believing these cells are justifiably living humans (or that their ability to become one has the most weight in the ethical discussion), after serious thinking about what the moral differences truly are, the only one that strikes me as not being arbitrary is the flaring of electricity in the brain.

Conception is an arbitrary moment to pick when turning the cogs back is wrong. I understand the intuitive appeal of the moment--the human genome becomes full, and the process toward being a human noticeably begins, but there is no moral difference between pulling a sperm from the egg when it is half an inch away than pulling the cells created from this combination out a moment later. A line must be drawn, most certainly. But great care and thought must be taken to consider where a line can be drawn non-arbitrarily.

Sentience is a fair indication of something being alive. Though it may not be the only morally necessary condition (I'm still mulling this one over), it is certainly a definitive one. If we could cure diseases by donating sperm, would it not be the imperative of men to do so? I believe it would. As such (and though I fully understand the disquiet encouraged by the matter) it is not wrong to use blastocysts for stem cell research.

Personally, I think one of the problems of this debate might be that we've come to herald the human species as innately more 'alive' or worthy of that life than other things, and cling to the idea of the potential human perhaps as a result of this. The human species has consistently and constantly, since taking the reins of its ability to survive away from nature, sought to separate it from all other forms of life--to claim it holy. I am not arguing that we should not respect or cherish the lives of our fellow humans--just that we have some perspective on the matter, and not resort to arguments about the holy human genome when talking about how we treat the word "life".

We too are comprised of biological materials and must morally (as we have the technology and knowledge that requires such thought) find a non-arbitrary line to draw, and it cannot be drawn as such if we misunderstand what it "means to be human" in the first place. A book could be written on the subject, but at the very least I can say that what it means to be human will surely be less worthy of the importance we have delegated ourselves for millennia.