Saturday, February 23, 2008

Zygotes in Hell?

If you say something like "human life begins at conception" you are making a religious assertion, if it is predicated on a supernatural premise, or a non-religious moral assertion, if you leave out the supernatural entities. In either case, your assertion is predicated on or is a metaphysical assumption that you cannot support by natural reason.

It does not follow from a belief that human life begins at conception that you must also support the use of coercion to enforce your beliefs and the consequences that flow from them. This particular belief is fairly abstract as a practical matter, and it has always seemed to me that the assertion is sometimes nothing more than an after the fact justification for authoritarian interference with women's reproductive choices or sexual activity. For me, if I have to weigh the liberty of an actual human being standing before me against the rights of a potential human being in the form of a nonsentient blob of cells, I have to go with the actual person every time.

As a religious matter, I don't know whether zygotes and blastocysts are human beings just like the rest of us who have been born. Will they be included in the resurrection and judged at the End of Days like other human beings? Will some of them be damned and others saved? What form will they take? Perhaps each fertilized egg, zygote, blastcyst or embryo will be raised up and given perfected versions of the bodies they would have had if they hadn't failed to come to term and become people. Probably not, though. There have been and will be countless billions of subclinical pregnancies that end in fetal wastage, and each of them would have to be raised up and judged and cast into hell for the most part. This doesn't seem right, though. Maybe all the zygotes and blastocysts and embryos get a pass on original sin, not having been "born of woman", in which case aborting them would be kind of a favor.

It doesn't pay to think too hard about this kind of thing.


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