Arguments in favor of re­search on human embryos typically play off our unfamiliarity with the way that we ourselves once ap­peared and existed as embryos. Humans in their tiniest stages are indeed unfamiliar to us, and they hardly look anything like “one of us.” Yet the undeniable conclusion, that every one of us was once an embryo, remains an indisputable scientific dogma, causing a “finger­nails on the chalkboard” phenome­non for researchers every time they choose to experiment on embryos or destroy them for research.

To enable scientists to get be­yond the knowledge that they’re experimenting on or destroying fellow humans, clever stratagems and justifications have had to be devised. Among the more success­ful of these approaches has been the well-known “14-day rule.” This rule, as noted in a recent article in the journal Nature, represents “a legal and regulatory line in the sand that has for decades limited in vitro human-embryo research to the period before the ‘primitive streak’ appears. This is a faint band of cells marking the beginning of an embryo’s head-to-tail axis… The formation of the primitive streak is significant because it represents the earliest point at which an embryo’s bio­logical individuation is as­sured. Before this point, embryos can split in two or fuse together. So some peo­ple reason that at this stage a morally significant individual comes into being.”

Most people have an in­stinctive moral awareness when they reflect on the reality that adults come from embryos. A particular conclusion organically follows, namely, that any decision to interrupt an embryo’s growth and development involves a will­ingness to destroy a prospective infant, child, teenager, and adult. Even the natural potential for the splitting and fusing of embryos does not substantively alter the fact that adults arise from embry­onic origins when traced back far enough along their particular de­velopmental trajectories. If any­thing, the possibility that an early embryo might divide and make twins means that a decision to destroy such an embryo might involve “double” the evil, since two future adults are being ex­ploited and exterminated rather than just one. 

It is also worth emphasizing that the 14-day rule, despite prot­estations to the contrary, has not ac­tually restricted real-world human embryo research to any appreciable degree, because scientists have lacked the ability, until quite recently, to culture human embryos in the lab for any length of time beyond about a week. In fact, it was only in 2016 that several new studies figured out how to grow human embryos beyond what the 14-day rule might forbid. The rule, thus, was an agreed-upon convention of no practical signifi­cance for any researchers who may have been carrying out experiments on embryonic humans in recent dec­ades. Considering the fact that the rule may now actually begin to ham­per what some of them are interested in doing, they are pushing, unsur­prisingly, to “revisit” and “recali­brate” the rule. 

Historically speaking, the 14-day rule arose largely as a mechanism for justifying what had previously been considered immoral, even unthink­able, research. The rule enabled seri­ous human rights violations to pro­ceed apace under the pretext of pro­viding restrictions and regulatory limitations. By feigning that the 14-day rule was somehow an ethical tenet grounded in biological facts, promoters of the rule devised a clever way of offering lip service to the moral status of the human embryo. They implied that one could show respect for the human embryo through the establishment of such a rule, even though the rule objectively demonstrated no more respect for vulnerable humanity than German researchers during the war would have, had they declared a “14-year rule”, namely, that only concentration camp inmates below the age of four­teen would be experimented upon. Whether 14-days or 14-years, such rules at root constitute mere contriv­ances to justify unethical science. As bioethicist Daniel Callahan observed back in 1995:

 “I have always felt a nagging uneasiness at trying to rational­ize the killing of something for which I claim to have a ‘pro­found respect.’ What in the world can that kind of respect mean? An odd form of esteem--at once high-minded and alto­gether lethal.” 

Hence, the broader strategic goal of conventions like the 14 day-rule has been not to identify or set in place any objective moral lines, nor to acknowledge authentic moral con­cerns, but to circumnavigate those very concerns by means of the con­vention, and achieve particular prag­matic outcomes, most notably: the continued expansion of the research, the minimization of “public outcry and backlash,” the continued avail­ability of research funding, and the avoidance of legally restrictive em­bryo-protective measures that might be debated by justly-concerned legis­latures. The ultimate goal of a con­vention like the 14-day rule has been to establish the idea, erroneous at its core, that prior to a certain arbitrarily-determined time point, developing human beings can be deemed suffi­ciently different from us that an “us and them” chasm can be used to jus­tify their violent exploitation.

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