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My own suggestion is that the moral status of the embryo, the fetus, and indeed any individual is determined by its possession of those features which make you or me morally more important than cats or canaries. At no stage of its development does the human embryo or fetus possess features that relevantly distinguish it from cats and canaries, save two. They are species membership and potential. Species membership, however, is devoid of moral significance; species preference is, like race or gender preference, simply a prejudice. Potential is no more helpful: whatever potential is possessed by the human embryo is also possessed by the unfertilized egg and the sperm and so the argument that we have an obligation to realize human potential becomes the exhausting and unattractive ethic of maximal procreation.
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