The personal and the political

I recently finished reading Embryo: A Defense of Human Life by Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen. I picked it up at the library to do a bit of reading about the other side of the argument and ended up agreeing with the authors -- to a point. The premise of the book is that an embryo is a human being and a person and therefore should neither be experimented upon nor terminated.

I have mixed feelings about the argument against experimenting upon embryos; I consent to participate in research studies on a regular basis. If the embryo, a minor by age as it is not 18-years-old, has a parent consenting for it, what's wrong with performing research upon it? But I also firmly, unapologetically, and undebatably continue to support legal abortion, even after reading a book in defense of human life.

I disagree with the author's argument against 'moral dualism', or that one object can not have two moral statuses. I believe a fetus, until the point of viability (which, for abortive purposes in many states is defined as 26 weeks, although I believe that gestational age could be pushed to 30-32 weeks if one takes into account wanting to avoid having a severely medically compromised infant on life support), is not yet a person. A person is one who can exist outside the womb.

As for the book, I wish I remembered more of my undergraduate courses in philosophy and ethics in order to fully appreciate the author's arguments. However, even without such recall, I was left feeling that some of their conclusions lacked evidence to back them up.