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Mass extinctions occur in 27mil-yr cycles + 14-day rule: Shortening embryo personhood

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Mass extinctions of land-dwelling animals occur in 27-million-year cycle
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/...120720.php

INTRO: Mass extinctions of land-dwelling animals--including amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and birds--follow a cycle of about 27 million years, coinciding with previously reported mass extinctions of ocean life, according to a new analysis published in the journal Historical Biology. The study also finds that these mass extinctions align with major asteroid impacts and devastating volcanic outpourings of lava called flood-basalt eruptions--providing potential causes for why the extinctions occurred... (MORE)


14-day rule: When does a human embryo have the moral status of a person?
https://psyche.co/ideas/when-does-a-huma...f-a-person

EXCERPTS: . . . The technique offered new hope to millions of infertile couples around the globe, but it also sparked fears of a dystopian future. ... For an anxious public, visualisations of miniature humans being artificially manufactured seemed deeply disturbing. ... even ... James Watson, decried the rise of IVF, telling a congressional subcommittee that the technology would see ‘All hell break loose, politically and morally, all over the world.’

As early as 1979, regulators responded to these concerns by establishing the ‘14-day rule’. It soon became an internationally accepted regulation in reproductive medicine: a legal and ethical guideline that prohibited scientists from sustaining human embryos in the lab beyond 14 days. [...] Although the 14-day rule doesn’t directly affect the process of IVF ... it does impact researchers’ ability to investigate the reasons why IVF can fail, which happens on average 70 per cent of the time. Such failures often come at a significant financial and emotional burden to prospective parents. However, exactly why the rate remains so high, more than 40 years after IVF was first developed, is still something of a mystery.

Reproductive experts argue that extending the 14-day rule to 28 days would provide a window for understanding how IVF can go wrong, and why some women are more prone to this misfortune than others. They also point out that extending the 14-day rule would allow for more research into how to put unused embryos from IVF clinics to use for the greater good, rather than seeing them destroyed as can happen now.

However, these scientific arguments must be weighed against the social, moral and ethical qualms that various members of the public have about human embryo experiments. Even 28-day-old embryos are a long way from the capacity to feel or experience sentience. As these arguments rage on, technological breakthroughs in embryo culture that make it easier to keep embryos alive in the lab for longer are putting greater pressure on the 14-day rule...

[...] Some people feel that any embryo, from the point of fertilisation, has the same right to protection as a newborn baby, and so cultivating it purely for research would be wrong. Others maintain that embryos are simply a ball of cells, and so don’t warrant any special rules. Somewhere in the middle lies the gradualist viewpoint whereby an embryo is seen as growing in moral value as it develops, eventually acquiring, at some point before birth, the status of a person... (MORE - details)
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