It is impossible to draw a line in any specific time and say that before that time the embryo was not a living thing. "Human life is a continuum from the one-cell stage to death. At every stage human life has dignity and merits protection," said Edmund Pellegrino, M.D., professor of medicine and director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Ethics, Georgetown University. (Marwick). It does not matter if you kill this embryo at day three, week four, or week five, there is still a life being taken away at any of those points.
After there has been a successful creation of an embryo in which a birth would be the result, there is normally a handful of embryos that are left over from that particular case. Those embryos are then normally donated to a clinic and frozen. For those who say those extra embryos have no use, Linda Bevington of the Center of Bioethics states "A lot of proponents of the stem-cell research are saying these embryos are extras, and they'll never be implanted, and they're doomed/destined for destruction anyway, so we might as well just take their cells and create some therapies and some good. However, it is possible to adopt those embryos. It's often termed 'rescue surrogacy,' and so those embryos aren't necessarily destined for destruction. They can be implanted, and a healthy baby can be born." (Bevington). There are many extra embryos that are left behind by people who no longer need them which can be "adopted" by other couples and lead to possible births as is the case most of the time. .
There are other ways in which stem cells can be obtained besides extracting them from frozen embryos. Other stem cells can be taken from blood or bone marrow from adults. It would be more beneficial to those unhealthy patients to get stem cells from their own organs or organs of other adults than from an embryo. The reason for this is that it would be easier for the body to accept their own type of cells rather than those from an embryo (Nichols).
