Embrio's and Souls...IVF? When is someone a person? ?

Question

I believe in souls, but when does a person get their soul.

Example: IVF. Doctors take eggs, they take sperm and put the two together, and they make an embryo in a Pietro dish. It starts to multiply like in the womb, then they "implant" and freeze the rest they dont use, for later use. The ones that dont attach to the womb, did they have souls? The ones frozen? Do they have souls? The ones not used...murder?

I am confused, as I believe in souls, but have a problem with Christan's raging against medical advancement, and abortion clinics being staked out with people with placards telling the women inside they are going to h**l. (you dont know what you would do unlsess you were in that situation...)

Answer 1

I think "soul" is a made up concept.

Can you answer these questions?

Do monozygotic twins share one half of a soul (one embryo splitting into two)? Do intersexed people have two souls (two embryos fusing together)? Where does the soul come from? When EXACTLY and how does it enter the embryo(s)? Where is it in a person? If souls only exist in humans, when in our evolutionary past did it first come about, how, and what was the advantage of it? Why only humans and not other apes or animals? Where's the evidence for any of this?

Answer 2

religious people dont know what to say about this question so they dodge it by saying that the soul enters the body when the baby is born.

Here see:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;...

Answer 3

never.

Answer 4

I suspect this is one of those things that an infinite and omniscient God works on a case-by-case basis. Already knowing the fate of the zygote, God infuses its soul at the point where the meiotic dance is complete and the polar body has been cast off. If we were as attentive as He, we wouldn't be dicing with that human being who is so precious to God. We would be bending our efforts to make as certain as possible that every such zygote has the best possible chance for making it from one cell to the trillions of the adult human body.

Answer 5

It is my belief, and I am not dogmatic in this, that the moment of fertilization, when sperm and egg unite, a living soul is formed.

http://jayzuv.com/nee.html/ What is man?

http://creationontheweb.com/content/view... Stem cells and murder.

Answer 6

Not to long before birth.

Answer 7

When their nervous system is developed to the point that they can react to stimuli.

Answer 8

I think the problem many of us have with IVF is that we simply do not know.  Some take the approach that since we do not know, it is not a problem.

Others of us say that since we do not know, we should err on the side of life.  

Christians are not "raging against medical advancement."  Ethical boundaries have always been a part of scientific advancement.  They always should be.  

Answer 9

You are correct in what you say.  We need to approach all of this with love and understanding as we try to come up with answers together.

Answer 10

Birth.

Answer 11

You seriously think someone on this board knows the answer? Only thing we humans can do about certain things is speculate.    

Answer 12

My personal belief is that you have a soul at conception.

Answer 13

I'm not religious, but I personally believe that you become a 'person' with a 'soul' at the moment the heart starts beating.

Answer 14

No one can answer this question definitively, though obviously several answerers above have attempted to do so.  

Since the soul cannot be detected or measured scientifically, it is impossible to say when it joins the body--if, indeed, the soul exists at all.

Answer 15

Don't you want a baby through God's way?

Answer 16

I agree with you that standing outside of abortion clinics telling women they're going to h**l is very opposite of what Christ would do.

I also agree that some medical advancements are wonderful and we should thank God for them. Others, however, are morally problematic, and IVF is one of them.

The fact of the matter is, nobody knows whether or not the soul becomes linked to the body at the exact moment a sperm enters the egg or sometime later. Logically, it seems to me that it would be immediate, because as the zygote develops into an embryo which develops into a fetus, there is no one point in development that makes the being suddenly human -- it's a human being all along.

IVF treats these human zygotes and embryos like they are inanimate objects, to be frozen, thawed, poked at, judged and often discarded down the drain. Did you know that when they are frozen, less than HALF survive after being thawed out? Some die while frozen and others get something akin to "freezer burn" -- the medical tech will judge them to be "less than viable" and just pitch them. It's terribly inhumane treatment, which is why my Church rejects IVF as a morally acceptable medical advancement.

It's true that sometimes, humans conceived in the ordinary way simply do not implant in the womb and die. Or they implant in a fallopian tube and die. But the natural death of a human being is one thing. CAUSING the death of a human being by mistreatment is certainly very, very different.

Either way, these souls that are lost to this world are safely in the hands of God.

Answer 17

At conception.