The new U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) draft Strategic Plan defines a human being as “beginning at conception.” This is a powerful declaration and could be seen by some as a positive shift toward scientific reality, but it is hollow, as the term “conception” is invalid, ambiguous and exclusionary. If HHS truly wants to advance its mission of scientifically-grounded health and wellness for ALL human beings, their strategic plan should use the objective, accurate and empirical scientific facts about when a human being begins to exist.
The word “conception” is unscientific and was formally rejected by FIPAT (Federative International Program for Anatomical Terminology), the international scientific organization responsible for reviewing and publishing the correct facts and terminology associated with human anatomy and human development from fertilization to birth. The scientifically accurate word for human sexual reproduction is fertilization. The biological science of human embryology formally instituted this fact 75 years ago as part of the Carnegie Stages of Early Human Embryonic Development, the global standard of human embryological research, and the Carnegie Stages continue to be verified annually by a global committee of scientific experts. The 23 Carnegie Stages cover human development during the eight-week embryonic period, and document that in sexual reproduction a new, whole, individual, living human being — an individual member of the human species — begins to exist at the beginning of the process of fertilization, when a sperm makes first contact with an oocyte/“egg.” A new human being, a human embryo, is represented by Carnegie Stage 1a.
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