A picture is worth a thousand words! After mailing out our November letter, I ran across this photo of a 12 year old boy holding up his earliest baby picture as a 3-cell human embryo. He was conceived by IVF technology – hence the early photograph of him as a 3-cell embryo.
“I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvelous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.” (Psalm 139:14)
Put this picture with your November letter to show your children and grandchildren at the Thanksgiving table. I had saved this from a magazine several years ago and the text in the magazine that went with it is as follows:
“Twelve years between pictures: Not everyone has a picture of himself just a few days after being conceived. Jonas does, and he is just one of the many children in the world who have come into being thanks to IVF treatments. Amazingly, the little cluster of cells on the screen has become a healthy boy approaching adolescence. IVF children themselves sometimes find it difficult to understand the process. On the other hand, since young children have no preconceptions about reproduction, they tend to be able to take in and accept the information they receive.”
Human life begins, like everything else, at the beginning. You might consider scanning this and sending it to your state representatives along with Dr. Jerome Lejeune’s explanation of the initial 3-cell stage of each of us.
Dr. Lejeune, the world dean of geneticists, taught that all is present to build the new human being we later will call Mary, or Peter, or Paul in the 3-cell human embryo. He explained that it is at the 3-cell stage that ‘individualization’ occurs. First, there is the 1-cell human embryo; then it divides into 2. He said: “We were expecting it to then divide into 4 cells, 8, 16, etc., but instead, after it divides into 2, it divides into 3 cells. He went on to indicate that this was a mystery to the geneticists. Why 3 cells? He said that it’s as though at the 3-cell stage the cells are talking to one another and they are saying, “We are no longer a mass of cells. We are an individual.” He added: “It is curious that it takes a trinity to make a new human being.”
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