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To make that distinction, he says, is to bestow personhood at a later stage in development.

One complicating factor for conferring personhood at conception is that a large number of fertilized eggs do not implant, says Hessel Bouma III, professor of biology at Calvin College and chairman of the bioethics commission of the American Scientific Affiliation. Estimates of the number of fertilized eggs that fail to implant run as high as 70 percent.

Conservative Christians have been reluctant to face this fact, Bouma says.

"It's something we've only become aware of in the last 30 years—the majority of fertilized eggs fail to develop," he says. "If we consider the fertilized egg as a person, then take all of the other causes of death and multiply them by three—that's the number of so-called persons who are dying before developing."

Bouma says that personhood should be conferred during the second trimester of pregnancy. Before that point, he says, too many things can go wrong. But most evangelicals, such as Robert D. Orr, director of ethics at the University of Vermont College of Medicine, tie personhood closer to conception.

At one time Orr considered personhood to begin at implantation of the fertilized egg in the uterus. But threats posed by advances in biotechnology have made him reconsider.

"I think it's important to hold the line for moral standing to start at conception," Orr says. "If you move the line away from conception, it just opens up the door to so many technological advances."

Orr first became involved in bioethics following the Roe v. Wade decision in the 1970s. He eventually gave up his medical practice in Vermont, where he'd practiced for 20 years, and enrolled in the University of Chicago to study bioethics.

He has studied personhood as it relates to both the beginning and end of life. Vermont has been targeted by the Hemlock Society as the second state (after Oregon) where a "death with dignity" bill, which he opposes, could be introduced.

Orr and his colleague, C. Christopher Hook of the Mayo Clinic, have written an essay in the Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics entitled "Stem-Cell Research: Magical Promise vs. Moral Peril." They argue for recognizing a unique human individual at the earliest stages of life.

In the abortion debate, they write, it is ironic that "many argue that it is not a human until it is 'out of the uterus,' and in the stem-cell debate many argue that it is not a human until it is 'in the uterus.' These arguments based on the individual's location are feeble attempts to deny the basic fact understood and accepted by scientists for many generations: humanhood begins with the union of 23 chromosomes from the ovum with 23 chromosomes from the sperm."

Most Christian ethicists that Christianity Today interviewed hold that personhood begins at conception. Like Kilner, though, many of them note that the practices of evangelicals don't always reflect that view.

For example, during the in vitro fertilization (IVF) process, embryos are frozen, rated for their quality, discarded if they hold genetic defects, or thawed and dumped in the trash if they are no longer needed. None of these practices would be acceptable in the case of fully developed persons. But most are accepted by evangelicals undergoing IVF treatments.

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July 2004, Vol. 48, No. 7