Are Embryos Morally Equal to People?
That is the question posed by William Saletan in his article on Slate, today: The Machine of a New Soul: The messy biology of Human Embryos. Saletan begins:
I say no. Robert George, a member of President Bush’s bioethics council, and his colleague Christopher Tollefsen say yes. In their new book, Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, George and Tollefsen conclude not only that embryo-destructive stem-cell research should be defunded but that any research involving embryos should be banned if it even slightly risks an embryo’s health. They propose to halt the common practice of producing extra embryos during in vitro fertilization and to require that every IVF embryo be transferred to a womb.
On Monday, Robert George and Christopher Tollefson provided this reponse on National Review to another article by William Saletan in the NY Times that reviewed their book.: Embryo: A Defense of Human Life. George and Tollefson write:
Saletan praised the book’s “essential and timely message.” He conceded that embryos have a certain moral standing—one that is, presumably, not enjoyed by mere gametes, tissues, or organs. “We should never create and destroy embryos lightly. We owe them our respect.” Yet the respect to which embryos are entitled, Saletan evidently believes, is not inconsistent with what he himself describes (in considering cloning) as “the mass production, exploitation, and destruction of human embryos.”