Journal? What journal?

I don't write as much as I used to, not anywhere. I've started three entries for LiveJournal that I never finished and never posted. And yet, I'm tempted to start a new journal.

There are several ideas for journals that I'm tempted to do, but the one I'd be most likely to use would be "Unfinished Tales." That's where I'd put all my orphan essays, the ones that I get half-done writing, get bored, and wander off, never to finish. I could put story snippets into it, as well. Not scenes from my book; just the little bits and pieces of stoy ideas that still drift through my head on the average day. Stuff I could write down that I would know I was probably never going to finish. Back in the 80s, when I kept an offline journal, that's what I did with it. It was home to a myriad of half-baked thoughts and stories that stopped mid-sentence.

I guess I have a certain respect for what readers I do have. I don't want to post half-completed entries, even if it is my journal and I can write what I want.

In-Vitro Fertilization and the Pro-Life Movement

I was reading an article about in-vitro fertilization (IVF hereafter). The article was primarily concerned with a new technique to minimize the chances of multiple births. (Multiple births, even twins, have much higher associated risks than single births.)

What caught my eye, however, was the manner in which IVF is conducted. What happens is more-or-less this: doctors harvest a number of eggs from the donor mother, then mix them with sperm from the donor father. The fertilized eggs which result from this are then incubated in a petri dish for two to six days. Then doctors examine the developing embryos, select the ones that look the healthiest, and implant them in the mother.

In traditional IVF, I gather eight or more embryos may be created, of which two to three, or possibly more, will be implanted, in the hopes of producing one infant.

Now, for those who are generally pro-abortion, this should pose no moral challenge. Even if you have a standard of “when the fetus has a heartbeat” or “looks like a baby”, you probably need not be worried about this. (For reference: a three-day old embryo is, in fact, the proverbial “small cluster of cells”. A healthy one is visible through a microscope as a small round mass composed of eight cells.)

But if you believe that life begins at conception, then this poses significant moral dilemmas. One could argue that the prospective parents are killing seven or more people in order to give life to one.
( But is that the best analogy? )