Shall We Give Citizenship to Fertilized Eggs?
By John M. Swomley
[Dr. John Swomley is professor emeritus of Social Ethics at St. Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, Missouri. He is a frequent contributor to this journal.]
The Catholic bishops who organized the "`right to life" or anti-abortion movement in the United States have also planned the various strategies to accomplish their purpose. Their most recent strategy, which raises serious ethical questions, is to involve Protestant allies in changing their theology to conform to official Roman Catholic politics. That strategy is to get Protestants to accept current Catholic dogma (in force for about 130 years) that a human being exists at fertilization rather than at birth, as biblically defined and accepted for thousands of years.
Before exploring this further it is important to note that the overall purpose of the Roman Catholic bishops is to eliminate not only legal abortion but also contraception by taking political control over Congress and the Presidency so as to secure appointments of only anti-abortion, justices to the Supreme Court. They could then overthrow Roe v. Wade, which made abortion legal. Their ultimate purpose is a Constitutional Amendment that would require federal and state governments to accept the Vatican position. To accomplish this objective they have been using incremental strategies, beginning with the organization of a "right to life" movement at every level within the Roman Catholic churches and at all political levels: state, Congressional district, county, and down to precinct.
Their next step was to expand it to Protestant groups so as to keep it from being rejected as simply a Catholic movement. They sent lay emissaries to persuade Protestant evangelists such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to get into politics on this issue. They were successful and before long the Mormons and Southern Baptist Convention leaders were also brought on board.
Successive strategies included, among others, persuading the Reagan administration, in the words of Time magazine, "to alter its foreign aid program to comply with the [Roman Catholic] church`s teaching on birth control" (February 24 1992).
Before that a group of Catholic bishops, led by Archbishop Joseph Bernadin, met with presidential candidate Jimmy Carter on August 31, 1976 and agreed not to endorse his opponent, Gerald Ford, if he would make Catholic appointees to certain positions when elected. Those appointees then crippled the State Department`s family planning program, and Dr. R. T. Ravenholt, director of the Agency for International Development`s global population program, was dismissed.
Henry Hyde, a Vatican loyalist, became the chair of the Republican Platform Committee and has succeeded in its adopting platform planks giving fetal life rights over those of pregnant women.
The bishops next made an important ideological move to persuade Congress and various state legislatures to adopt a ban on what they called "partial birth abortions." Their strategy throughout was to adopt incremental legislation to limit abortion. Theoretically, the so-called "partial birth abortion" was to prevent the few late-term abortions which physicians perform to save the life of the woman or to extract dead or severely damaged fetuses, such as one without a brain or other essential organs.
The next strategy was tocall late-term abortions "infanticide" and expand laws to preclude second-trimester abortions which are possible under present law. In Missouri, for example, the law that was adopted in 1999 was written by a lawyer for the state Catholic Conference, using language that would apply to early abortions. Legislators hesitated to oppose "infanticide." When the Governor vetoed it, his vote was overridden.
Only three states–Washington, Colorado, and Maine–held referendums rather than let legislatures decide. Despite extensive well-funded campaigns by the Catholic bishops, the people in these states rejected these "partial birth abortion" laws, partly on the perception that these would have been the beginning of a ban on all abortions.
While the above strategies are continuing, the bishops have launched new strategies. An example is the following: "Be it resolved by the House of Representatives of the State of Kansas that, based on undeniable medical, biological and scientific facts, we do hereby acknowledge and affirm that the unborn children in the state of Kansas have an equal and inalienable right to life from conception/ fertilization and that allowing the termination of the lives of innocent human beings even before birth violates section 1 of the Bill of Rights of the Kansas Constitution."
That resolution quotes the Bill of Rights: "All men are possessed of equal and inalienable natural rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," and then asserts that "men" includes women, children and unborn children. The resolution also states that "by using DNA profiling…even before the new being is implanted in the mother`s womb, we can be absolutely sure we are monitoring the same individual from conception/fertilization through the various stages of growth."
The fallacies in such a resolution are these:
Personhood is defined in the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as "All persons born or naturalized in the United States…are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside."
The resolution is mistaken in speaking of "undeniable medical, biological and scientific facts" that permit monitoring the same individuals from conception/fertilization through the various states of growth."
Here is what Dr. Charles Gardner, who did his research at the University of Michigan Medical School`s Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, wrote:
The "biological" argument that a human being is created at fertilization…comes as a surprise to most embryologists…for it contradicts all that they have learned in the past few decades.
Gardner notes that "in humans when two sibling [fertilized] embryos combine into one [as sometimes happens], the resultant person may be completely normal. If the twooriginal [fertilized] embryos were determined to become particular individuals, such a thing could not happen. The embryos would recognize themselves to be different…and would not unite. But here the cells seem unaware of any distinction between themselves….The only explanation is that the individual is not fixed or determined at this stage [fertilization]"
Gardner further states, "The information required to make an eye or a finger does not exist in the fertilized egg. It exists in the positions and interactions of cells and molecules that will be formed at a later time."
Gardner concludes that "Fertilization, the injection of sperm DNA into the egg, is just one of the many small steps toward full human potential. It seems arbitrary to invest this biological event with any special moral significance….It would be a great tragedy if, in ignorance of the process that is the embryo, state legislators pass laws restricting individual freedom of choice and press them upon the people. The embryo is not a child. It is not a baby. It is not yet a human being."
Michael Bennett, chair of the Department of Neuroscience, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, wrote: "Personhood goes with the brain and does not reside within the recipient body….There is none, not heart, kidney, lung or spleen, that we cannot do without or replace artificially. The brain is the essence of our existence. It cannot be transplanted."
The National Academy of Sciences has stated that "The proposal that the term `person` shall include `all human life` has no basis within our scientific understanding. Defining the time at which the developing embryo becomes a person must remain a moral or religious value."
Dr. Leon Rosenberg, while chairman of the Department of Human Genetics, Yale University Medical School, stated: "Some people argue…that life begins at conception….I have no quarrel with anyone`s ideas on this matter, so long as it is clearly understood that they are personal beliefs based on personal judgments and not scientific truths….The scientific method depends on two essential things–a thesis or idea and a means of testing that idea….I maintain that concepts such as humanness are beyond the purview of science because no idea about them can be tested."
A Catholic embryologist trained also in Roman Catholic theology, Robert Francoeur, ridiculed "those who claim a person is present at fertilization and thus denounce all abortion as murder. If every human egg fertilized is immediately a `fetus`, `baby` and `person`, then God and nature play a mean trick on us. Scientists estimate that in the five-six days following union of egg and sperm, between one-third and one-half of all `persons` spontaneously degenerate and are reabsorbed or expelled. In the second week, 42 percent of the implanted `persons` abort. In the fetal period one-third of the remaining fetuses spontaneously miscarry. Thus out of every 1000 `persons` `conceived`, only 120 to 160 survive to be reborn! How do the anti-abortionists and theologians who denounce abortion as murder account for the prodigious waste of human life on the divine plan?"
Moreover, if the "right to lifers" insist on their idea of personhood in a fertilized egg, it is unenforceable in law. Robert Francoeur satirized the possibility that "legal pronouncements about personhood from the moment of conception could be translated into a Brave New World with pregnancy police to make certain that all fertile women have their monthly pregnancy test, and all pregnancies are monitored to assure the Constitutional, God-given inalienable right of every fertilized egg to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Will fertilized eggs be counted in the census? Will parents receive conception certificates instead of birth certificates? Will the state issue death certificates for miscarriages and require embalming? If the pregnant woman commits a crime can the fetus keep her as a convicted felon out of prison because a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is guaranteed the fetus? What about denominations that accept the Biblical definition of a human being as being born, and do not baptize miscarried embryos and fetuses? Do the sectarian Roman Catholic writers of this proposed legislation really want to impose their religious beliefs on all other faiths?
From an ethical standpoint, the implications of this resolution are that the life of the fetus is more important than the life of the woman who carries it and more important than her born children.
This resolution does not recognize the conflict of life with life. Some years ago at a meeting of the American Society of Christian Ethics a workshop was confronted with the case of a 3-year-old child and an 18-week fetus, both with a dread disease for which there was only one injection of medicine in Chicago. The Chicago airports had been shut down by a blizzard, preventing the doctors from obtaining more of the medicine.
The Christian ethicists unanimously concluded that the child should get the injection. The moral difference is that the child is among us in a way that the fetus is not. The child`s claim is based on relationship, rather than on a legal point of birth.
Although the Roman Catholic hierarchy strongly opposes intentional abortion, in practice it sometimes recognizes the priority of the woman over the fetus, as is evident in the following excerpt from a U.S. Catholic Conference publication. Operations, treatments and medications which do not directly intend termination of pregnancy but which have as their purpose the cure of a proportionately serious pathological condition of the mother, are permitted when they cannot be safely postponed until the fetus is viable, even though they may or will result in the death of the fetus.
Finally, this whole initiative is based on a propaganda approach known as prolepsis, which Webster defines as "an anticipation; especially the describing of an event as taking place before it could have done so; the treating of a future event as if it had already happened." For example, describing an acorn as if it were already an oak tree or a hen egg as if it were already a chicken.
The most characteristic aspect of personhood is consciousness that is dependent on a brain.
