Embryonic Stem Cells Ethical Essay

In the wake of many recent ethical issues in healthcare, it has become a heated topic for doctors, scientists, and activists to bring up to the debate table. It is unethical when it comes down to abortions, medical marijuana legalization, euthanasia and assisted suicide. Ethical issues in healthcare are not always clear to discuss in terms of right or wrong. As an illustration, even if something is considered ethically wrong or simply disagreed with, it could still be permissible on a legal viewpoint. This left each individual healthcare practitioners to create a boundary for themselves. One common ethical issue in healthcare today is harvesting human embryonic stem cells for health and medical research. Simply put, stem cells are defined as …show more content…
Embryonic stem cells are preferred rather than using adult stem cells because they have greater developmental potential. The question of the when human life starts to form has been highly controversial and closely linked to debates over abortion in the United States. It is not arguable that embryos have the potential to become human beings; if implanted into a woman’s uterus at the appropriate hormonal phase, an embryo could develop into a fetus, and become a live-born child. Some people, on the other hand, believe that an embryo is a person with the same moral status as a human being. Regarding religious faith and moral conviction, it is believed that “human life begins at conception”, hence an embryo is considered a person. That is to say, an embryo has interests and rights that must be respected by donors. Health practitioners, in the biotechnology field in general and medical laboratory science field particularly, are constantly under fire for ethical issues. Therefore, it poses a great challenge to innovate new solutions to combat the need to destroy an embryo for stem cell research and serves as motivation for scientists to think