ALS challenge results in more skin cell deaths than embryo deaths?
More human cells - mostly skin cells - probably die when you dump a bucket of ice water over your head than are actually in a four-day-old embryo (pictured here above). If anti-choicers are really worried about cellular life, telling people to stop killing their skin cells for those greedy ALS sufferers would be the more direct approach.
~ Amanda Marcotte, mocking pro-life opposite to the ALS ice bucket challenge, because some of ALS’s funding goes toward embryonic stem cell research, via Slate, August 22

Does anyone have a middle school biology book they could send to Amanda?
“Does anyone have a middle school biology book they could send to Amanda?”
I don’t think there would be any point in that. It’d probably be above her reading level.
Poor Amanda… such a sad girl you are.
We worry about unique lives, Amanda. We so aren’t worried about EACH of your little skin cells, but we are very concerned about ALL of your cells. And we would sacrifice our own lives to make sure that your life is protected from harm.
We felt the same about you when you were a cute little zygote.
Skin cells are functional parts of human organisms. Sperm cells and egg cells are reproductive parts of human A zygote is a human organism. Amanda Marcotte is ignorant beyond belief.
“Although life is a continuous process, fertilization is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is thereby formed…. The combination of 23 chromosomes present in each pronucleus results in 46 chromosomes in the zygote. Thus the diploid number is restored and the embryonic genome is formed. The embryo now exists as a genetic unity.”
[O’Rahilly, Ronan and M?ller, Fabiola. Human Embryology & Teratology. 2nd edition. New York: Wiley-Liss, 1996, pp. 8, 29. This textbook lists “pre-embryo” among “discarded and replaced terms” in modern embryology, describing it as “ill-defined and inaccurate” (p. 12}]
Remember when Amanda Marcotte blogged for the John Edwards campaign? Boy, that was funny lol.
http://fox13now.com/2014/08/20/fail-ouch-ice-bucket-challenges-gone-hilariously-wrong/
Rebecca: This textbook lists “pre-embryo” among “discarded and replaced terms” in modern embryology, describing it as “ill-defined and inaccurate”
Yeah, it’s a blastocyst before implantation, and an embryo after implantation, correct?
To remain confused of basic human biology in this day and age of technology for your own agenda is beyond being an ignoramus! However, I don’t believe she is such an ignoramus she only plays one to rally up the few who agrees with her on the quest to make Pro-lifers look ignorant.
Bless her heart does she know how dumb she sounds?
“I don’t believe she is such an ignoramus she only plays one to rally up the few who agrees with her on the quest to make Pro-lifers look ignorant.” – or disengenuous. Either way, the obvious fallacy in this makes her look both.
At fertilization, the new one cell is unique and alive and growing. It takes time to look like a baby, but we’re fully human every step of the way.
It probably took a long time for Marcotte to get so ignorant. Stupidity like that doesn’t sprout up overnight, and that’s a fact. LOL!
These are basic things we learned in middle school.
Like begets like.
There is no spontaneous generation.
When sperm joins with egg, a new organism with its own DNA is formed.
A human slave is not 3/5 of a normal person; he or she is a normal person.
You cannot be “halfway” pregnant.
John Merrick was a human being, not an animal.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sF19L00KbAI
A caterpillar is a single organism, even though it is not yet a butterfly; the caterpillar stage is just a developmental stage.
A tadpole is a frog; it is just in an earlier stage.
Per Dr. Seuss: a person is a person no matter how small.
Being a one-celled organism does not mean you are not alive; no one would argue that the one-celled bacteria reproducing in our gut is not alive.
Babies come from…well, if I have to explain it, maybe you are not ready to hear it.
A baby joey comes out of the womb quite early, relative to other animals – good thing mom has that pouch!
A mouse gives birth after 20 days; does that mean a mouse is not an individual living organism at birth, since it has not hit 20 weeks yet?
I could go on and on.
Trying to make a political view be scientific really takes hard work. Following what we know of biology is much easier, since it all adds up and makes sense.
To deny a four-week-old fetus is not an individual human being is unscientific. The embryology textbooks, and many other scholarly sources, say life beings at conception, even if we are unaware for a few weeks that this has happened.
There is no scholarly scientific source saying life beings at any other time point. Only attempts to declare “what difference does it make?!?! –This is the argument offered by Obama and Cecile.
It may have first been piloted in 1959 by Bent Boving, in his chapter, “Implantation Mechanisms,” part of the monograph, Mechanisms Concerned with Conception: Proceedings of a Symposium Prepared Under the Auspices of the Population Council and the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, 1963, MacMillan Company, NY. LC # 63-21772…
“Finally, there are some difficulties of terminology that are no more than a price of progress….If, then, implantation, like life, is a continuity of mechanisms, how shall we say when it begins or when it is that a woman becomes pregnant?” Etc.