Steve's Question

In response to Michael's post, I take it to be a premise of Steve's question that most Americans do not in fact believe in the "equal dignity and worth of every human being from conception to natural death."  In that sense, the question is very much different from the situation confronted by Martin Luther King.  I think most people in the 1950s and 60s did (at least purport to) affirm the fundamental equality of all human beings and, at the same time, affirm the fact that African Americans were indeed human beings in the fullest possible sense.  That is, if you asked people at the time (apart from heated exchanges over civil rights) whether black people were "full human beings," they would have said yes.  The same does not seem to be true of most people in the United States today with respect to the question of human embryos, particularly in the earliest stages of their development.  If you asked most people today whether blastocysts are "full human beings," I think the majority would say no.  So an appeal to internal (in)consistency does not seem possible here.