Is an Embryo a Baby? | Scientifically

is an embryo baby it's a good question it's a question that i think all of us have wondered it's certainly a question that i've wondered and there's a reason for that it's it's so significant it defines so much of our decisions and our position on current issues it's clearly a polarizing question but can we address it objectively can we take a look and really take and really try to find out when does life begin and is that life a person let's explore it together today [Music] [Applause] hi everybody i'm joseph walter and this is loving theology so um as we approach this question i want to really break it into two parts um and i think that this will be helpful to you the first part that i want to take a look at is addressing this question through the lens of science what does scientific observation teach us about the answer to this question and then next time maybe we'll take a look through the lens of the bible and actually add in some scripture to see what the bible says about this question but the reason i want to do this is because to the extent that you're not sure yet maybe about the bible i'd still like to try to answer this question for you and i truly will do that i want to put a pen in the scriptures i want to i will not use bible verses in this video instead we'll just simply talk about scientific evidence to explore this question and just so you know as we're going through this we've got more resources on our website than i've got in video form at this point so as i talk through this i'll reference some of those resources but please do feel free to check them out because i've written a lot more here than i actually have had time yet to record hopefully i'll be able to record more of it as we go through this but for now i'm just going to try to give an overview of the scientific piece of the research that i've done but i'll leave the more detailed scientific pieces in written form for now but hopefully later we can add those in videos now before we dig into this question i think that it's important that i probably clarify the question that i'm asking whenever i say is an embryo baby i really mean from the point of conception onwards and depending on the strictness of the definition of the word embryo that that may not be the right term to use but i hope that you understand that i'm using the term a little bit more loosely here because it seemed like that's the way that people were asking the question online and i wanted to help people find this resource so i hope that you can understand that additionally i wanted to explain that i want to take more of an objective approach to this question which might sound good but there's pros and cons to it really the the pros are that hopefully i'll be able to present the information and we'll be able to discuss what that information tells us rationally without a whole lot of bias or emotion in the process the downside though of taking that approach is that i may not be able to communicate my heart on the matter or the way that i care about what this question means for us because the reality is that this this is one of the big questions that i think carries a heavy weight for a lot of people whether you've had a miscarriage or maybe you've found yourself terminating a pregnancy or even just the way that you voted can really make this question mean a lot to you and i i don't want to make it seem like i don't care about what this question might mean for us but in the discussion today i just i won't make the time or have the time to really talk about that there there's another post where we tell a little bit more of our story behind why this question was so important for us and our journey in finding an answer to it and i talked a lot better in that post about um our heart behind the matter and that was a post for mother's day that i'll link for you um so i hope that you can understand in this post though i'm going to take a little bit of a different approach so the first part of this question is when does life begin and in answering that question scientifically we need to make sure that we address it with the most relevant science and the most relevant science by far is biology which biology itself actually means the study of life so in in studying biology we learned that there are certain characteristics of living things that whenever those characteristics are present then that defines something as alive and so as we look through those characteristics we can see that actually all of those characteristics become present precisely at the moment of conception at the moment of fertilization it's the process of fertilization that forms the first cell of the organism which that's one of the first characteristics that has its own unique genetic code that begins to grow and develop consuming energy and materials to do so while maintaining an unstable internal environment and responding to its external environment so those are all of the characteristics that are present and each of those become present precisely at the moment of conception at the moment of fertilization and for that reason virtually all biologists would agree that the cell that's formed at fertilization called the zygote is alive that it has all of the characteristics of living things but maybe you want a little more for me rather than just hearing each of the characteristics and me telling you that they're there you want to hear the evidence that they're there i've reserved that for another page on our website that hopefully i'll be able to put a video out on eventually that we've called when does life begin where i talk about the evidence of each of those characteristics of living things but because that question is a little bit more readily agreed upon by scientists i wanted to spend a little more time on the question that divides scientists here um the question that divides us more often actually is whether or not this living thing is a person and that's really the crux of the issue so to speak and to start with let's make sure that we have a good definition for that word person merriam-webster simply defines a person as a human individual so using something called the law of identity we can get a little bit more specific in our question whenever we're asking the question is an embryo a person from the moment of conception we can actually substitute that word person for its definition again using the law of identity so in doing that what we're doing what we would change the question to is is an embryo a human individual from the moment of conception so let's explore that part so i said earlier that it's the process of fertilization that forms genetic code for that first cell that living thing gets its dna at the moment of conception and as we look closer at that dna we can determine what species that dna is and in order to be obviously a human individual the first question is is that living thing a human and the most objective definition for human is dna so as we look at that dna we can see that that is indeed human dna but that still leaves us with this question of okay that that first cell that zygote is human is a human living thing but is it an individual that there's something more to being a person than simply being human that has to be an individual maybe another way to phrase that question that's probably a bit more familiar is is it an is that living thing any different than a tumor growing inside the mom's body or any other cell in her body is it just really part of her body um or is it its own living thing its own individual organism its own individual human and as a result its own person so to determine the answer to this part of the question of whether or not that human thing that's alive is a human individual that's alive and therefore person we can take a closer look at the dna that's formed at fertilization we all know that crimes can be solved by looking at dna and the reason for that is because our dna identifies us as individuals that if you took a look at my dna from one cell then you could tell that that was me if you compared it to another cell from me but it would be uniquely distinct from any other person's dna on the planet and that's how you know that it is me as an individual that that was my dna that that was my cell um and so as we look at that then let's take a look at the dna that's formed at fertilization is that dna different from the mother's dna is it different from the father's dna and yes the process of fertilization forms unique dna that is specific to that individual so as a result what we can say is from an objective sense of the terms there is an individual organism that that organism is not part of the mother but that organism is an individual organism and that organism is also human so this organism this living thing that's alive at the moment of conception is a human individual from that point of fertilization onwards before i keep going let me take a brief aside and say that we've got more on this part as well on our website on a page that i've called when is a person a person where we we've written about sort of more of the details behind some of these points that i'm making this is really meant to be more of an overview but let me get back to it there's there's still more that i want to talk about here let me maybe take a step back and see what we've seen so far and asking the question is an embryo baby or is an embryo a person let's start with the definition of person a person is a human individual now it's the process of fertilization where the embryo first becomes alive and in looking at that living thing at the moment of conception it is a human organism that it has fully human dna furthermore it is an individual human organism at the moment of conception so in other words what we can say is that in the most objective sense of the terms science definitively tells us that a human individual is alive at the moment of conception so at the moment of conception the embryo is a person at the moment of conception an embryo is a baby so what does that leave us with then because you know there's still a lot of objection to that conclusion but in the most objective sense of the terms in using only scientific observation it seems pretty clear that there is a human individual that there is a person at the moment of conception but i think the most common objection is that there's something more to being a person than simply being a human individual that there's something that's kind of hard to put into words and kind of hard to observe um maybe we would call it the soul that there's something missing in what i'm defining as a person the problem is that the soul really isn't a scientific concept it's not one that we can really comment on and part of the reason for that is that by definition the soul is basically unobservable so you can't use scientific observation to determine whether or not there is something that's observable the unobservable soul now the soul is really a religious concept and the bible does have an answer to this question but i told you that i would save that for next time um for now i want to continue to try to look through the lens of science but like i said this isn't really a scientific concept if anything it's more of a social concept then if it's if we're not allowed to use religion then it's really more of a social concept and so maybe then if if we can't use the natural sciences like biology maybe we can use the social sciences like history to help to address this question of is there a difference is is a human individual always a person so do we have any examples from history where human individuals were regarded as not having souls do we have any examples from history where there were human individuals who were considered not really persons that there was some distinction between them now the answer to these questions actually is yes we do have examples however these examples are tragic the first example i'll give is from the 15th to 19th century the transatlantic slave trade was one where society justified the enslavement of african peoples on the grounds that somehow they were less than people somehow they didn't have souls but by every objective sense of the terms they were human individuals they were people but somehow society justified in fact even the scientists of the day twisted those clear observations of science to still try to justify their enslavement this makes my gut churn i cannot believe i have a hard time imagining society let this happen how did we let this happen how did we get confused on this point how did we justify the murder the abuse the enslavement everything that we did on this fallacy that these human individuals were not people it is hard to believe and in 1933 there was another example the holocaust where the nazi regime basically justified the murder of millions of jews russians slavics and other peoples on the grounds that somehow they were less than people again by every scientific objective measure these were human individuals these were people but somehow society and the nazi philosophy didn't recognize their humanity but instead viewed them as less than people there's an author and historian named david smith who explained it this way he said the nazis were explicit about the status of their victims they were intervention sub-humans and as such were excluded from the system of moral rights and obligations that bind humankind together it's wrong to kill a person but it's permissible to exterminate a rat in his book that he called less than human smith ties together and points out basically this thread throughout human history that ties together these atrocities that we look back on through the lens of history and wonder how in the world did we let that happen through this common justification of dehumanization taking someone who is by every objective sense a person every objective sense a human individual and then saying no they're not quite people dehumanizing them taking away their humanity now i said that i would be logical and dispassionate in this conversation i'm sure that you can tell i've gotten a bit heated in talking about these examples so let me maybe uh do that as we apply these examples to our question here perhaps uh you're familiar with george santayana's quote it's famously paraphrased as those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat its mistakes and obviously these are examples of mistakes in our history so what do we have to learn from them what do they teach us what they teach us is that there is no difference between the human individual and the person that to be a human individual is to be a person and that any time that we have fabricated a distinction between those two things that history has only ever looked back on that with sorrow and regret that we cannot take the objective truth that is verifiable that there is a human individual there and simply in our minds subjectively overrule it that is the very definition of dehumanization but i think the question is is this all relevant here are these examples relevant are these lessons relevant to the embryo at conception now let's start with what we've seen here what we've seen is that in every objective sense of the terms the embryo is a human individual at conception so we have that we have that objective fact but is dehumanization actually happening are they being dehumanized in other words our positions like being pro-choice at a certain level based on a philosophy that dehumanizes the embryo and you'll have to forgive me for how pointed this example is going to be but in february of 2016 the national abortion rights action league use their twitter account to condemn what they called and i'll quote it here the anti-choice tactic of humanizing fetuses in other words what they were saying is that whenever you humanize the fetus you're being anti-choice that whenever you humanize the embryo you're being anti-choice and and the other way of saying that or the mirror image of saying that is that to be pro-choice at a certain level you have to be willing to dehumanize the embryo you have to be willing to dehumanize the fetus and the problem with that is that like i said we have seen in every objective since that the embryo is a human individual at the moment of conception and so whenever we dehumanize what is objectively a human individual eventually history will look back on those justifications the justifications that our society has used and connect the dots to every other example of dehumanization throughout history now i know that this has been heavy and maybe i've been a bit too pointed i can only hope that somehow i haven't offended you and i realized like i said from the beginning that the nature of this conversation and the way that i approached it where i'm presenting information and trying to help you reach a conclusion about a question that a lot of us have has been more rational and has done a poor job of communicating my heart and maybe because of that this could come across as i'm condemning you or i'm condemning people or that i'm judging people and i promise that is not my heart that is not what i'm trying to do um but like i said i've got another video that maybe does a better job of communicating that in our post for mother's day a while back um i shared a bit more about our heart and our story behind this in our heart that we don't want this to be a burden on anyone but instead we want it to set people free um and i would hope that maybe you would consider watching that video so that you can see a little bit more of my heart on the issue and not just the rational discussion that we've had here so like i said this time we focused on this question through the lens of science and scientific information and we tried to answer it from that perspective and next time what i want to do is i want to approach the same question but from a completely different vantage point from the vantage point of the scripture from the vantage point of the bible what does the bible have to say about whether or not an embryo is a baby does it support or contradict what we've seen here does the bible even talk about conception does it talk about how life should be regarded at the moment of conception is that person a person at conception according to the bible let's take a look through the verses together next time be sure to subscribe and hit the bell because you won't want to miss it thank you again for joining us

Channel: Loving Theology

Views: 641

Keywords: Is an embryo a baby, when is a person a person, when does life begin, when should we have human rights, when is a baby a person, when does human life begin

Id: oMQoWfTOiBY

Length: 18min 26sec (1106 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 19 2021