Doc O:

Maybe all YOUR integumentary epithelial cells are dead; quite a few of mine are alive, and I have in fact extracted perfectly good DNA from them — although of course other body cells, un-keratinized, or their nuclei for preference, would be a better choice for cloning. But your argument is a red herring anyway. You know perfectly well what I meant.

A zygote is a diploid cell; a blastocyst is an early embryo, some of whose cells have begun the trip toward determination, but only begun it. There are as yet no “tissues” and nothing even remotely like sensation, let alone like consciousness. Those latter two are words that need not be played with: they stand for themselves, unlike “human” or “baby.” Perhaps, though, you believe there is already a soul in the zygote or the blastocyst?

I have, BTW, not only completed a course in embryology, but taught them for some forty years, in some good universities. Google me up! As to “Are infants human?” Sure, depending upon what you define as an “infant.” And so what? Yes, abortion is a difficult moral question, but it is that only because some few not very ancient forms of religious belief MAKE it a moral question, and because abortion is (almost) always a painful emotional issue for the potential mother, whether or not she is religious. But There is no reason in reason, in the twenty-first century, for abortion to be a “litmus test” issue for political candidates in a nominally secular liberal society with existential problems to solve.