This was a great article to read. I was able for the most part to follow along and understand Flowers argument. And secondly I have much more interest in stem cell research than Fortunes book on DeCode genetics.
I guess the question thought is what do you consider life? Everyone has different answers to that question, some are moral, some are personal experiences, and some are through our education that form an opinion on what is human life, an some people really just don't care. As we know people with moral or religious backgrounds believe that as soon as the egg and sperm meet life is formed. I think if I understood Flowers article or the way I did understand it, his point was to tell us the process to what happens when the egg and sperm meet and then for us to decide on our own what is considered life. One argument is that genes are not expressed for a couple of hour after fertilization,(which to some people then might mean that this is not considered a human life) meaning that the eggs not unique to anything else. After those couple of house genes are beginning to be expresses and more is going on inside the egg, which then maybe that would be considered life. Of course this is all a personal opinion, but I support stem cell research and I feel that at disease progress we need to progress in our research, and if that means using embryos then so be it, just use them in the most moral way possible. Which brings up another issue, is what does one consider moral? This is a big topic to tackle and whatever is done and said will never make every human being happy.
The one thing that I guess I would argue about what Flower said was that he considered babies not to have reflexes until after birth, that them suck their thumb and kicking around in the mothers stomach was just a natural way of being and that these were not the baby actually deciding to make these action(if I'm understanding his take on this) I will disagree, I have not had a baby myself but I know enough about what the baby does in the belly to have an opinion about reflexes. I think the baby does decided to do these things and yes it may be part naturally embedded into them, but I also think that they know what is comfortable to them, and what they like to do in the stomach. Am I understanding this? I maybe completely off topic here, or not correct about Flowers point he made in class.
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You do have my argument right. I might say some of what you said a bit differently. There is the case you note where our individual attention is turned to what we see and know about embryonic and fetal development and WE then attribute meaning and attach moral significance. About your final paragraph, a correction and the my counter-argument. I don't argue that there are no reflexes until after birth; I'm arguing that the early movements (even as complex as suckling movements) are roughly equivalent to reflexes. It's the "deciding" part that would still argue against. "Deciding" is a higher brain function and in the early fetal stages there simply is no neocortex in place. There's nothing for the fetus to "decide" with. It may seem strange that complex activities are "just" reflex-like but that's the interpretation I think the facts of development lead us too.
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