1. How do you think Raina voted on proposition 71? How would you have voted? Why?
I believe that Raina voted for Proposition 71 to fund embryonic stem cell research. After spending some time researching I came to the conclusion that if I were in the same predicament as Raina. I would vote for proposition 71 to fund ES cell research. The main reason I voted yes was I don’t believe that harvesting the stem cells from a five day old embryos that would have otherwise been discarded after in vitro fertilization can be considered the destruction of human life.
2. Do you think the five-day-old embryo should be accorded the status of a human person? If not, why not? If so do the potential benefits of ES cell research outweigh the ethical objections?
I do not believe that a five-day old embryo should be accorded the status of a human being. A blastocyst, which is what a five-day-old embryo is considered, is just a clump of cells that has the potential of becoming a human being but just because it has the potential does not mean that it makes it a human being or that it’s alive. If harvesting the ES cell from within a blastocyst can improve the quality of life for living human beings, and then I do not have a problem with that. The current argument is that destroying human embryos is akin to killing
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After reading about therapeutic cloning, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is no different than what researchers are trying to do with ES cell research. The difference in the process is that the egg is penetrated, without destroying it and the nucleus is removed with the host DNA and replaced with a nucleus from the cell of the donor that requires the ES cell for therapy. At that point the egg is left to develop into a blastocyst using the donor DNA and the process of extracting the inner cell mass to cultivate the stem cells that are genetically compatible with the