Human beings, being mammals, do not lay eggs. This fact, known to most school children, is frequently forgotten by those in the media reporting on advancements in embryo and cloning research. The latest example of media misrepresentation on embryo research comes from Saturday's Los Angeles Times which ran the headline, "Abortion opponents push for 'personhood' for eggs."
The Los Angeles Times reporter examines pending bills in several states that would confer legal personhood on the unborn child from the first moment of conception. Nicholas Riccardi cites efforts in Colorado, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana and Georgia to bring ballot initiatives forward that would recognise the existence of a human person from the moment of conception.
Riccardi quotes Belinda Bulger, deputy legal director for the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) who complained that the "type of language," in the Colorado ballot initiative is deceptive.
In Colorado, should the effort succeed to bring a ballot initiative forward in 2008, voters would be asked if the constitution should "include any human being from the moment of fertilization as 'person' … in those provisions of the Colorado constitution relating to inalienable rights, equality of justice, and due process of law."
Ironically, Bulger said the language of the question "may be scarier than an outright ban. First, because it can be hard for people to understand what it's doing, and second, because it would be far further reaching."
Pro-life advocates have often pointed to the misrepresentation in media of terminology surrounding cloning and embryo research. Terms such as "pre-embryo", "balls of stem cells", or "fertilized eggs" are commonly used to indicate what human embryologists have defined scientifically as a human embryo in the earlier stages of development.
Despite what many refer to as the "debate" over when a human being begins to exist, the facts have been known for more than a hundred and thirty years. In 1875, the German zoologist Oskar Hertwig showed definitively that penetration of a spermatozoon into an ovum was the beginning of independent life and that the terms "conception" and "fertilization" are therefore interchangeable terms.
Human embryologists have shown that once fertilization has taken place, neither the male nor female sex cells (often misnamed "eggs") continue to exist.
Dianne Irving, a scientist and ethicist who has written extensively on the subject, says that misdirection by the media in terminology has enabled much of the enormous gains in legalizing destructive research on human embryos in the last ten years.
In her 2003 article, "Playing God by Manipulating Man: The Facts and Frauds of Human Cloning", Irving wrote of "the purposeful and massive manipulation of language, science, ethics, legislation and politicians" that has led to the creation of such legislation.
"We are being led into 'believing' that what are being manipulated and dissected in petri dishes in laboratories across the world during human cloning experiments are not really innocent living human beings who will be killed in the process. Rather they are 'just a bunch of stem cells'."
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