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Monitoring Stem Cell Research 
attempt to answer the question posed in Donum Vitae : How can a 
human individual not be a human person? 
Certainly Catholic writers who reject the church’s teaching on 
the status of the embryo have responded directly to that question 
(See Cahill, 1993; Farley, 2001; McCormick, 1994; Shannon, 2001; 
Shannon and Walter, 1990), but so too have non-Catholics. For 
example, in a statement issued by their ethics committee, what was 
then called the American Fertility Society rejected the claim in 
Donum Vitae that science supports the personhood of the embryo. 
According to the ethics committee . it remains fundamentally 
inconsistent to assign the status of human individual to the human 
zygote or early pre-embryo when compelling biological evidence 
demonstrates that individuation, even in a primitive biologic sense, 
is not yet established. Thus, homologues (identical) twins may result 
from spontaneous cleavage of the pre-embryo at some point after 
fertilization but prior to the completion of implantation. Furthermore, 
during very early development, an embryo is not clearly established 
and awaits the differentiation between the trophoblast and the 
embry oblast” (American Fertility Society, 1988, 3S). 
Arguably, writers like Mary Anne Warren and Bonnie Steinbock, 
who distinguish between biological or genetic humanity and moral 
humanity, are also at least indirectly answering the question posed 
in Donum Vitae (Warren, 1997; Steinbock 2001, 1992). Yet, whether 
writers are responding more or less directly to Catholic discourse, or 
not at all, the important point is that the stem cell debate has been 
remarkably preoccupied with the question of whether the early 
embryo is an individual person and whether and how the minute 
details of embryological development help us to answer this 
question. This is one reason why a fair amount of the ethics 
literature on the topic reads like a textbook on embryology. 
I want to be clear here: I am not suggesting that the details of 
embryological development are unimportant. The maxim from the 
field of research ethics applies here as well: bad science is bad 
ethics. My point is rather that the preoccupation with the details of 
early embryogenesis may lock us even more rigidly into an 
individualistic human rights framework than we are in debates about 
abortion. It also leads us to frame the debate as fundamentally about 
one question, and, indeed, it tempts us to treat the question as if 
there is one and only one answer. In this frame of mind, once we 
have that answer, there is not a lot more to talk about. Either the 
early embryo is a person with the right to life, in which case 
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