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Ethical and Policy Developments 
IV. THE MORAL STANDING OF HUMAN EMBRYOS 
Many elements (though, as we shall make clear, not all ele- 
ments) of the ongoing debate about federal funding of human 
embryonic stem cell research seem, as we have reviewed 
them, to turn on a basic disagreement about the nature, char- 
acter, and moral standing of human embryos. Public debate 
over the moral standing and appropriate treatment of human 
embryos has been quite contentious and divisive in recent 
years. In part, this had to do with its almost inevitable entan- 
glement with the abortion debate, itself a deep and thorny 
controversy in America. In part, too, this has been connected 
to the fact that the question of the moral standing of human 
embryos touches many other fundamental moral and existen- 
tial questions involving human origins, human dignity, the 
moral significance of our biology, and its relation to numerous 
traditional and widely shared moral teachings.^° Differences of 
opinion on the moral standing of human embryos often sug- 
gest differences on these larger questions of overall world- 
view.^^ Nonetheless, the question of the moral standing of hu- 
man embryos itself has been taken by nearly all commentators 
to be amenable to human reason and argument, and a lively 
debate has raged despite (or perhaps precisely because of) 
these widely diverging starting assumptions. 
In the public arena, the question of the moral standing of 
human embryos has often been summed up in the question, 
“When does (a) human life begin?" This question suggests 
something of the quandary, although the academic and intel- 
lectual debate generally takes a somewhat more nuanced 
question as its starting point. That question has as its un- 
stated premise the fact that under normal circumstances we 
regard all born human beings (from newborns through adults) 
as possessing equal moral worth and meriting equal legal pro- 
tection. It then reflects upon the ways in which human em- 
bryos are similar and different from live-bom human individu- 
als, the moral significance of those similarities and differences, 
and therefore whether embryos should or should not be af- 
forded protections.^^ 
The first and most common recourse in seeking an answer 
to such questions has been human biology, and particularly 
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