This article is a depressing commentary on the state of the stem-cell debate. The author has no idea what pro-life intellectuals actually believe, so he has to invent a position to serve as a foil. (He also has no familiarity with actual Christian teachings regarding ensoulment, and creates some of his own to fill the gap.) Not surprisingly, he does a bad job of it, as the title of his commentary suggests. “Do Stem Cells Grown from Unfertilized Eggs Have Souls?” Nobody serious, including the Catholic bioethicist that the article quotes, would answer that question affirmatively; nor does an affirmative answer logically follow from what the bioethicist does say.

The question raised by the research mentioned in the article is whether a human parthenote–the entity created when an unfertilized egg cell is stimulated to start dividing–is capable of organizing itself in the way a human embryo does. If the answer is yes, then the same moral and theological arguments that are brought to bear on embryos could be brought to bear on it, and if not, not. The scientific question remains open, and therefore the philosophical one does too. (The weight of informed opinion at the moment is that human parthenotes are not embryos, even defective ones.)