Alabama’s Supreme Court recently said that frozen embryos are children and those who destroy them can be held liable for wrongful death. As I read this I thought about all of the things that have to develop, be cultivated, and/or be augmented in order to evolve to their ultimate form.

If an embryo is a child, then:

A paragraph in Microsoft Word is a novel

Flour is a cake

A pile of lumber is a house

A tube of oil paint is a masterpiece

An acorn is an oak tree

A ball of yarn is a sweater

An infant is the President

Of course, any of them could become something beyond their initial state, but they are not that. They have some of the necessary ingredients, but they need time and effort and some other ingredients to become what we may hope they will be.

We may hope an embryo will become a child, but hoping will not make it so.

More to the point, we must want the embryo to become a child. We must want the paragraph to become a novel and the yarn to become a sweater. If we don’t, then the embryo, the paragraph, and the yarn are all surplus to requirements and we can keep them or dispose of them or donate them as we please.

Your religion may demand different outcomes, but I am not religious and your religion does not apply to me. You are free to accept, reject, or debate your religion’s moral philosophy and values, but you are not free to apply them to me. Religion is personal, not societal.

Some of religion’s precepts are useful, and perhaps foundational, in developing our communities, but they are not guidelines for life choices for all individuals. I can choose practicality over dogma, health over mores, and independence over faith. Those choices are the great blessings and the great burdens of our freedoms.

There are, of course, legal and philosophical arguments surrounding this debate which are beyond my qualifications. It seems to me, though, that logic deserves a higher place in the hierarchy of meaningful contributions, and logic tells me that an embryo is entirely dependent on the human or the cryogenic nursery in which it survives. If an embryo cannot live and breathe outside of that environment, it is not a child.