Bill Clinton’s appearance on Larry King Live last night with Dr. Sanjay Gupta has set off a spate of fertilized embryo blog posts that wonder what he was saying.

There’s a great deal of confusion out there, so to make it clear:

After conception, there is no such thing as a “fertilized egg”.

Don’t pay attention to on-line or recent dictionaries either, they’ve all been polluted.

The oocyte (egg) ceases to exist, once amphimixis (the DNA blending) is complete. In fact the moment the zona pellucida is penetrated major reactions occur, which transform both the egg and sperm.

When the transformation is finished, there is no longer a sperm cell or an egg cell. Two individual cells have become one. It is a zygote – a single cell human being.

Robert P. George lays it out clearly in his book with Christopher Tollefsen: Embryo: A Defense of Human Life

George goes through the whole process and backs it with medical and scientific references.

We lose when we continually refer to such a thing as a “fertilized egg” because that deceptively masks over what the zygote really is – a formed, existing human being at the most primary stage of life.

It also glosses over the amazing fact that the conception process is a unique, life-giving event for individual human beings and provides the flesh & blood basis for all human rights.

Related Posts:
“Fertilized Eggs” vs Zygotic Human Embryos