Studying...

...the ethics of human embryo research, reading Dignitas Personae as part of an academic course, . It is when you get to grips with the subject in a fresh way, that you realise all over again  what a  truly horrible mess we are now in. There are tens of thousands of tiny, dot-sized  living human embryos - the "spare" results of attempts at in-vitro fertilisation - stacked in chilled cabinets in laboratories. There is no ethical way to deal with these. If they are simply thrown away, we have embarked on a decision to destroy human life, a decision with massive implications.  And they cannot just be "donated" to women who would like to have children, as you cannot do that with human life - and these people would grow up not knowing who they really were, who their brothers and sisters were, and so on. We have created a real and ghastly horror of the type that a fiction writer of the 1950s and 60s would have relished. These living beings could be tampered with, experimented upon, messed about...