“[a]ll parties to these cases, like all members of this Court , agree that an unborn child is a genetically unique human being whose life began at fertilization and ends at death.: In LePage v. Center for Reproductive Medicine ___ So. 3rd ____ (Ala. 2024) (opinion of the Court by J. Mitchel)(emphasis added).
If all
members of the Alabama Supreme Court so agreed, they were all wrong. At fertilization, and for a short time
thereafter, the fertilized egg is sometimes not a
distinct human being, but instead one of two precursors of a distinct human being
or the sole precursor of two or more distinct human beings.Two zygotes can fuse to
produce a single zygote in tetragametic chimerism, and a single zygote can
split, producing monozygotic (identical) twins, triplets, quadruplets, or quintuplets.
We should
perhaps not be surprised that no biologist was asked to proof the opinion any
more than that life does not begin at conception, the egg and sperm both being
alive and, in fact, having as a pair the potential to become a human person
like you or me even before fertilization. Here the law of Alabama is not about
biology, history, or policy. It is all about religious dogma, as the
concurrence of the Chief Justice made obvious.
It is a bad
religious dogma because of its subjugation of women.
It is an
incoherent dogma not only for its conflict with biology but for that of its
adherents’ support for IVF which, as they know full well, involves the destruction
of embryos. The only moral way out of
this incoherence is to continue to support IVF and to discard personhood at
conception.
For more detail on the dogma of personhood for single cell see Conjectures & Arguments, Philosophy & Law: Life at Conception Argument (lawrencecrocker.blogspot.com)
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