Do you believe that an Oocyte (egg cell) is a human being?

Question

I've been having an abortion debate with my friend and he believes that if you consider an Embryo to be a Human being then you should also consider an egg to be a Human being as well. His argument is that he does not believe that there is a "significant" difference between an egg and an Embryo.

Answer 1

If you consider oocytes (another word for ova for people who don't know) to be human, then each woman has milions of tiny humans inside her from the day she is born, which die over time. It would make every menstration an abortion because that tiny human would die, and that leads to depressing throughts.

Oocytes die all the time, there's countless numbers of them and they're not special. An embryo is a new combination of DNA, which makes it different. Is that really significant? It my oppinion it's not until the embryo has developed neural tissue.

There must be a cut off somewhere as to when they stop being eggs and start being human, but I don't believe it's at the tiny embryo stage.  

Answer 2

An egg cell is not human.   A fertilized egg could be considered a human, and is by many people.

Answer 3

An oocyte is no more a human being that a skin cell, or a beta cell in you pancreas, or a neuron in your brain.  It is one cell, not a human being.  It cannot develop into a human being.  It does not even have the potential to become its own complete organism.  It would first have to reduce its genome by half to become monoploid, upon which it is an egg (still not a human being) that could be fertilized by sperm to once again become diploid.  At that point, then you can start the debate about what is or is not qualified to be a human being.  But not before fertilization of the egg (not the oocyte)  by the sperm.

Answer 4

There is one particular very significant difference, and that is that once an oocyte has been inseminated, the gene structure changes completely.

Therefore it is reasonable to say that after insemination, what was once an egg is now the beginnings of a human, but that an egg is not human.

...And if eggs were human, each woman would murder once a month for several years during her lifetime.

Answer 5

I'm not sure what the h**l a "Oocyte" is, but an ovum (egg cell) is not a human - nor is an embryo:

The egg cell definately isn't human until it's nucleus has fused with a sperm cells, and an embryo is just a cluster of cells that can't really be considered human either.

Answer 6

The egg cell isn't fertilized yet, so it isn't a human.