Coloradans will vote as to whether or not a “fertilised human egg” should be considered a “person.” (Story here.) This is vaguely reminiscent of the era preceding the Fourteenth Amendment, when Americans wondered whether or not African-Americans should be considered “people.” (Other Western societies have asked the same question about women. Denying “personhood” to those whom one would like to oppress has never seemed to work out that well.)
Now, for the liberal media in action:
The Human Life Amendment, also known as the personhood amendment, says the words “person” or “persons” in the state constitution should “include any human being from the moment of fertilization.” If voters agreed, legal experts say, it would give fertilized eggs the same legal rights and protections to which people are entitled.
First of all, “fertilised eggs” are a bit of a misnomer. Before fertilisation, there is a sperm and an egg; immediately afterwards, there is a human. It’s not like one gamete disappears while the other is slightly modified. The egg in question is more accurately called a “zygote,” which is the result of the union of gametes, before cell division. Approximately 16 days after fertilisation, a heart and blood vessels begin to develop. Aside from the fact that “fertilised egg” is inaccurate, the “blob of cells” stage lasts for a very short period of time.
The scientific-sounding terms are not about medical accuracy, but about rhetoric. A “fertilised egg” is not, and cannot be, equated with a person; one is a half of something that will be a person, and the other is whole and complete. It ignores the medical reality that the “egg” has all of the DNA it needs to grow into an adult, and, like every other human, only needs nutrition and a safe environment in order to fully develop.
Next up, standard-issue pro-abortion fearmongering:
And the amendment carries broader implications, critics say, such as limiting medical research involving embryos, inviting intrusive government oversight of pregnancies, and banning certain contraception, including the morning-after pill and the intrauterine device, or IUD.
“If we give fertilized eggs legal rights, abortion could be considered murder and a woman could be sent to jail for making the difficult life decision to terminate a pregnancy,” said Crystal Clinkenbeard, spokeswoman for Protect Families, Protect Choice, a coalition of medical professionals, community groups and religious leaders who oppose the amendment.
As Sherry Colb (a pro-choice law professor) points out, pro-lifers aren’t looking to imprison women after having abortions. (For more pro-choice defence of this stance, see here and here.) Pro-life legislation, such as the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, only penalise physicians or abortionists who perform the procedures, never the women.
We would find it morally abhorrent to perform medical research on enemies in war; decades later, we still condemn the Tuskagee syphilis study for the evil it is; we condemn the allocation of scarce medical resources based on social rank, gender, and income; and we rightly condemn the use of non-consenting, unconscious patients for medical training.
Each bioethical scandal is rooted in the idea that a group of humans does not have unalienable rights - rights which cannot be removed by government fiat or for the “greater good” - that the right to life, health, and bodily integrity is conditional and is only granted to those of certain social statures. Even if embryonic stem cell research did not pale in comparison to adult stem cell research, and if stem cells were not available in cord blood, it is morally abhorrent to kill some humans for the benefit of others. We should have long ago gotten over the idea that those whom we seek to exploit are “not really humans” or “not really people like us.”
Final fear-mongering for the day:
For instance, if a woman miscarries, she could be held responsible if it were found she caused it, even unintentionally. If she smoked or drank while pregnant, her behavior might be considered negligence. Damaged eggs might be eligible for monetary damages.
Every state is entitled to limit abortion in the third trimester. We’ve yet to hear of women who miscarry (or have stillbirths) at a point in pregnancy at which abortion is not legal, but who are prosecuted or otherwise held responsible for the miscarriage. Women who smoke and drink while pregnant can cause permanent, lasting harm to their babies - harm which does not evaporate upon birth. Even if we are to buy the pro-choice rhetoric about “potential persons,” there is still a strong incentive to prohibit women from engaging in those behaviours. Finally, women who miscarry after tortious actions may sue for wrongful death. There was outrage in California in 1970 when the state’s supreme court ruled that a homicide statute did not cover the deliberate killing of a five-month-old foetus. Public outcry was so strong that California passed an unborn victim’s of violence act eight weeks later.
Former zygotes in Colorado: unite and vote pro-life!
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“making the difficult life decision to terminate a pregnancy”
I’m glad they acknowledge that destroying a human being is a difficult decisions.
“Public outcry was so strong that California passed an unborn victim’s of violence act eight weeks later.”
I need to find the text of that law and post it. I heard it read on the radio once and it was amazing. It fully conceded that a human being was being destroyed, but made a clear exception in the event that the mother wanted to pay someone to destroy her. Otherwise, it was capital murder. Everybody got that?
Neil’s last blog post..Abortion and capital punishment
Can’t remember where I saw this, but someone suggested that we tell the Dems that embryonic stem cells were discovered in the ground in Alaska (and, I would add, around our ocean borders). Then they’d drill like crazy!
Neil’s last blog post..Abortion and capital punishment
Keeler v. Superior Court, Cal. 1970, is here. Sherry Colb discuses it here.
California added “or a fetus” to its homicide statute afterwards. It was later held that the language does not apply to embryos (7 weeks gestation or earlier).
Ya know, Neil, they’ve yet to tell us why it’s a difficult decision if abortion is the moral equivalent of birth control. You don’t hear women talk about the “difficult decision” to use condoms.
Wow, that was fast! Many thanks.
Coming soon to a blog post near you . . .
Neil’s last blog post..Abortion and capital punishment
This debate seems so pointless to me. When hot heads are cooled, everyone on both sides of this issue will usually agree that a fertilized egg creates a unique individual, and it’s clearly alive - it grows.
The debate should be more honest. It should be, ‘If I don’t want a baby, is it ok to kill a baby when it is so very young that it won’t feel it?’ Because that’s what the debate is actually about. Suggesting that the kid is not a human being is just cover to justify killing it. Even supporters of abortion don’t truly believe that it’s not alive or that it’s not a person. At least none I’ve talked with after tensions from the debate have calmed.
Or maybe the debate should center around, “Frankly, it would be quite inconvenient for me to carry my baby around for 9 months, not to mention the lifelong commitment to him/her that is required. Maybe I will not be capable of caring for him/her as much as needed, forcing them into a sad state of existence. Perhaps I should just kill him/her.”
Those are the true reasons pro-abortionist people want abortion to stay legal. There’s no belief that it’s not a child. That’s just ‘cover’.
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Even supporters of abortion don’t truly believe that it’s not alive or that it’s not a person. At least none I’ve talked with after tensions from the debate have calmed.
I truly don’t believe that a zygote is a person. If I thought the pre-condition for personhood was having a unique set of DNA, I’d have to think that identical twins were somehow less of persons because their DNA isn’t unique — it’s identical.
The reason the phrase “fertilized egg” is used is to emphasize that IVF also would become very difficult and more expensive under a law that declared all zygotes to be persons. Suppose Louise Brown’s parents had lived in Colorado under this law. After having Mrs. Brown’s eggs extracted and Mr. Brown’s sperm extracted, they would not be able to combine sperm with more than one egg at a time unless the Browns said they were willing to undertake a multiple-child pregnancy and delivery. (Such a pregnancy is worse for the health of both mother and children than a single-child pregnancy; each twin generally will have a lower birth weight than he would have done had he been a single pregnancy, and carrying and delivering twins is harder on their mother’s body.) Because zygotes are declared people under the Colorado law, couples who are interested in IVF could not simply put these people on ice, as parents who are unwilling to dispose of excess zygotes currently do. If the zygote is actually a child, then every couple willing to be implanted with another couple’s excess zygotes would have to undergo adoption procedures.
I find it far more common for pro-life people not to actually want to treat zygotes the same way they would treat an infant, than for pro-choice people to believe that a zygote should be treated the same as an infant except with regard to abortion.
Thank you, PG.
There may be ways to change the IVF practises without actually mandating that women carry all of the embryos at once. My top choice would be to harvest fewer eggs, because the egg harvesting procedure (with the overdoses of hormones, used to extract as many eggs as possible) can have serious side effects for a woman.
Additionally, fertility clinics could have their patients make a choice with the embryos: implant within a specified time period, or put up for “snowflake adoption.”
Even without a Human Life Amendment, these are things that should be done. We acknowledge that there are bioethical issues with harvesting eggs from women and dealing with excess human embryos. This isn’t necessarily a pro-life/pro-choice issue - it’s an issue of human dignity and safe medical practise.
I’m not sure I understand why parents wouldn’t be able to put their zygotes on ice if they weren’t ready to have them. Is this a part of the law that I’m unfamiliar with? Why couldn’t they just give the excess fertilized eggs to other people once it became clear that they didn’t need them?
You would not be required to think less of identical twins than you currently do, unless you are somehow required to think less of clones. After all, that’s all identical twins are. Natural clones. Their DNA is still unique and viable - there will just be twice as much of it someday!
Kevin’s last blog post..Achmadinijihad Could Actually Pull This Off
Rox,
I am very much in favor of regulation of the Artificial Reproductive Technology industry (preferably federal regulation to prevent a “race to the bottom” among states). However, such regulation is necessary because there is huge market demand for making ART as efficient as possible in producing a baby. Particularly in the use of hormones to increase egg production and the egg extraction, women have to give informed consent, and millions of them have made the trade off between their own health and their desire to have a biological child ASAP. As I want to adopt kids, I find this trade off rather mysterious, but it certainly exists and is expressed in what the ART market offers customers. If there is a strong political movement for such regulation, it wasn’t making much noise when I was studying bioethics six years ago.
Kevin,
We may be having a grammatical disagreement: I follow the traditional view that any two things that are identical inherently can’t be “unique.” See American Heritage Dictionary’s definition of unique: “Being the only one of its kind… Usage Note: For many grammarians, unique is the paradigmatic absolute term, a shibboleth that distinguishes between those who understand that such a term cannot be modified by an adverb of degree or a comparative adverb and those who do not. These grammarians would say that a thing is either unique or not unique and that it is therefore incorrect to say that something is very unique or more unique than something else.”
If a set of DNA has been replicated in another person, then it no longer is unique because it no longer is the only one of its kind. Therefore it is a strategic error for abortion prohibitionists to dwell so much on uniqueness of its DNA as what makes the fertilized egg deserving of the full dignity of the status of a person. In addition to leaving identical twins in a bizarre position with regard to personhood, there’s the problem of cloning that you identify, in which DNA has been deliberately replicated (although clones are significantly less identical than identical twins, because only the nuclear DNA is replicated while mitochondrial DNA is different). I don’t see “unique DNA” as necessary, much less sufficient, for personhood.
If fertilized eggs are children, then under every state law of which I am aware, there are significant legal hurdles to having the excess children given to other people. Many people pursue fertility treatments precisely because they find the hurdles to adoption so onerous. Adoption is expensive and invasive of privacy. If every couple who implanted another couple’s fertilized egg/ child were required to undergo the same procedures as people who seek to adopt a born child, I suspect you would see a massive decline in such “snowflake” adoptions.
Rox’s suggestion that couples implant zygotes within a certain time period or have them adopted by another couple speaks to the peculiar personhood status that frozen embryos have. Do you think that leaving a person in a freezer for an indefinite number of years, with that person potentially “spoiling” in the sense of no longer being viable for implantation, fully respects that person’s rights?
Moreover, fertility clinics certainly won’t want the legal liability that personhood status for fertilized eggs would imply. Already they are on the hook for civil liability in any negligence that leads to the loss of fertilized eggs, but that’s just a matter of property law; the clinic has to pay money for the loss of things. If fertilized eggs are people, a fertility clinic that negligently kills the eggs, say by having a backup generator fail to work when there is an area power failure, will become criminally liable for negligent homicide. Indeed, as children, fertilized eggs presumably are in the physical custody and control of the clinic (even if legal custody remains with the parents), which imposes tremendous responsibilities on the clinic to care for the children.
PG,
Some of the problem with ART is that families will pay other women for their eggs, which changes the nature of the trade off and creates a conflict of interest. While a woman who stimulates her own ovaries for IVF will bear the risk of over-stimulation and under-stimulation - a problematic position, albeit one that encourages both doctor and patient to get the “best” (whatever that may be) results possible - there is no such internal check when other women’s bodies are used for harvesting eggs.
One can certainly take the libertarian position: a woman who contracts to sell her eggs bears the risk for such a sale and may build that risk into her price.
When I have more time, I’ll look up the recent changes in medical ethics with regards to ART and IVF.
Kevin - and other pro-lifers - take the opposing view. “Unique DNA” is sufficient, albeit not necessary, for personhood to attach.
There will always be problems when attempting to apply philosophical and linguistic absolutes to the messy arena of biology: twinning, chimeras, and cloning, to name a few, do not easily lend themselves to classification within a philosophical framework.
That said, I think that pro-lifers use “unique” as a shorthand, not for “partially unique,” or “unique as of now,” but rather to distinguish between the body of the offspring and that of the mother. “Unique [DNA]” really means “distinct [from the mother’s body]” - that which is unlike the uterine lining, ova, or other parts of a woman.
“Unique DNA” is also shorthand for “unique human being.” I don’t know nearly enough about embryology to know whether or not twinning is determined upon fertilisation, or if environmental conditions trigger it, or it is a combination of those two. Either way, the zygote that will twin is either a unique human being (that later becomes two unique - albeit not genetically unique - humans), or two unique humans that, like Siamese twins, are (currently) attached.
Rox,
I’m fine with banning the sale of eggs under the state’s massive power of market regulation, but I don’t think the government can ban the voluntary donation of eggs without infringing people’s rights. For example, if my older sister were unmarried until 35, and found that she was having fertility problems, my younger sister ought to be able to have her ovaries hormonally stimulated so she can have eggs extracted and implanted for my older sister. If the FDA finds these hormones to be unsafe, then they ought to be banned entirely, but the state should not prohibit egg donation simply because some people have a religious or other moral opposition to such a separation of sex and procreation.
There will always be problems when attempting to apply philosophical and linguistic absolutes to the messy arena of biology
I agree, which is why I object to having biological terms used as inaccurate shorthands for philosophical beliefs. It comes across as a weak attempt to mask what is actually a belief with unassailable facts. A fetus is biologically distinct from the woman carrying it, but this has nothing to do with DNA. Similarly, identical twins’ uniqueness from each other has nothing to do with DNA. It is nonsensical to claim to be talking about genetics and then say that twins can be both identical and unique. They can have unique minds/ souls, but by definition not unique DNA.
Ok, let’s go with the ‘grammatical disagreement’ then, PG. I’ve no desire to debate the definition of ‘unique’, so allow me to rephrase to clarify my position.
At fertilization, a brand new strand of DNA has been created, probably never before seen on the planet. If steps aren’t taken to intervene, it will one day become an adult human. It already has all of the information it needs to become this adult human. If it clones itself, it could become multiple humans, but that’s not particularly important at this stage.
True, it has a number of stages to go through before it becomes this ‘adult human’. It has to become a zygote, a fetus, a baby, a child, an adolescent, and then finally become an adult human. Again, unless we take steps to kill it at some point, it’s probably going to become an adult human being.
So, when did it become a human? And when is it acceptable to kill it? My hypothesis is that it became human at conception, and was just severely under-developed. Pro-choice advocates think it became human once it was pushed out. I cannot understand the logic behind that idea. Nothing much has changed other than the location of the kid. It’s still completely dependent upon it’s mother, just like it always was. This cutoff point makes no sense to me.
PG, if you don’t see your unique DNA as proof of your ‘personhood’ as you say, then what does prove that you are a person? And at what point is it no longer ok to kill the life-form that will someday become an adult human? Why did you choose that point in it’s life to switch from ‘ok to kill’ to ‘not ok to kill’?
BTW, I never said that I was pro-life. I’m not entirely sure that I am. I’m just a big fan of science, logic, and honesty. They all play a part in this discussion. FWIW, I do think it’s an abomination to kill kids, I’m just unsure if my opinion of the practice should be forcefully applied to you by the government. My libertarian tendencies tell me that if someone wants to kill the kid in their belly, maybe we should let them. My morals tell me that such an idea is ridiculous. Do you see my dilemma?
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Kevin, as you pointed out with regard to cloning, the fertilization of an egg by sperm is not the only way to create a zygote. At fertilization, yes, “a brand new strand of DNA has been created.” But unless you plan to exclude clones from personhood (should reproductive cloning unwisely be permitted), the uniqueness of DNA remains at best one way among many for an entity to qualify for personhood.
I prefer a definition for personhood that would admit non-human species that share our capacities for consciousness and moral action to be admitted to the fraternity, rather than one that prizes DNA uber alles. I go by species because I don’t think we ought to test this individual by individual, as such testing lends itself to abuses. If a species as a whole has the capacity, then all members have the protections of legal personhood if they meet the second requirement (see below). So far as I know, only humans have this capacity, which is why I don’t believe in such a thing as “animal rights.” But I don’t want to pre-empt the possibility that other unknown species might.
If steps aren’t taken to intervene, it will one day become an adult human
As a fan of science, logic and honesty should know, this is hardly accurate. Many fertilized eggs get flushed down the toilet without the woman’s even realizing that they got fertilized. Plenty of fertilized eggs don’t manage to attach to the uterine lining (which, as Rox points out, is part of the woman and is distinction from the egg). If you are troubled by a “step to intervene” that makes the uterine lining inhospitable to the fertilized egg’s attaching, then you are among those whom Rox implied exist only in the pro-abortion fear-mongerers’ fevered brains: people who want the Human Life Amendment to “ban certain contraception, including the morning-after pill and the intrauterine device, or IUD.” Even some forms of the traditional Pill are thought to work in part by making the uterine lining less hospitable to the fertilized egg’s attachment.
And of course around the time of Christ, there was no “probably” that even a born child would survive to become an adult human. I don’t recommend premising your idea of personhood around a particular historical moment.
Pro-choice advocates think it became human once it was pushed out.
Kevin, I’m pro-choice and I think the fetus always is human, and has legal personhood at viability. At the point that it can live even if its mother dies, the fetus is a person — one that still is dependent on someone to care for it, but not necessarily its mother. At the point that every hour of your life depends on the continued life of a specific other person who may not want to continue your life or her own (I don’t think a woman who commits suicide in the first trimester also ought to be post-humously thought a murderer), your claim to legal personhood such that you can dictate what that other person does is called into question.
Advancing technology may continue to push the line of viability back until we can decant healthy babies a la Brave New World, and women will carry pregnancies only if they want the experience. If so, I’ll applaud that development. In the meantime, viability appears to be at about 22 weeks, when air sacs develop in lungs.
So for me, there isn’t really a dilemma. If a woman carries a viable fetus and doesn’t want to carry it anymore, and an early delivery would not endanger the woman’s health or life, I am in favor of the law’s obligating her to deliver the baby rather than abort it. If the fetus is pre-viable, then it is wholly reliant for life on the woman’s willingness to continue carrying it, and your libertarian tendencies and I don’t think we ought to mandate that she do so.
As should be clear, I do not want to exclude clones from personhood, which is why I replaced ‘unique’ with ‘brand new strain’ when describing the DNA, kind of per your request. I hope we can dispense with the word ‘unique’ in the future to avoid misinterpretation on both sides.
“…animal rights.”
Heh, I certainly don’t agree that any animals should be given the same rights, or even rights similar to those afforded to the human animal. I EAT those durned things, for goodness’ sake! But that discussion is best left for another thread.
True, there are many forces of nature that might make this statement untrue. I assumed that this was fairly obvious and there was no need to state it. And yes, I do consider taking steps like taking RU-486 to force the egg to be ejected is pretty much the same thing as having an abortion. Probably a bit more humane though, since a fertilized egg certainly feels no pain.
I must say that I like your view (~22wks) better than ‘when it comes out of the oven’. As you’ve stated, the time ’till viability has dropped steadily over the course of the years. I have no idea if your 22wk statement is true, but I’ll accept it as fact for the moment. So, are you saying that if a woman is pregnant, and she decides that it’s too annoying or inconvenient for her to carry the child to term, she should be forced to have the child removed alive rather than have an abortion?
If so, I think that’s a pretty good compromise! It will get dicey as science steadily figures out a way to raise children outside the womb from scratch, but only time will tell how that plays out.
Very interesting conversation, PG and Ms. de Luca. Thanks.
Kevin’s last blog post..Achmadinijihad Could Actually Pull This Off
Kevin,
Thanks for your own contributions. We’ve found an area of legal compromise, although keep in mind that many people would not be satisfied by requiring a woman to deliver the viable fetus as soon as she decided she didn’t want to remain pregnant. Premature babies have lower survival rates than full term babies, and also tend to carry a host of problems both physical and mental; the more premature they are, the greater their difficulties in life will be.
If viability keeps getting pushed further back, such that women who currently get a first trimester abortion now would be required to deliver a three-month-developed fetus, our society will have to be prepared for the huge cost of caring for an influx of disabled people, especially as a woman who refused to carry the baby to term is unlikely to want anything to do with it after delivery.
A few additional notes on reproductive science:
Clones don’t necessarily have a brand new DNA strain. Suppose you take the nucleus from one of Rox’s blood cells, and use it to replace the nucleus of her ova. This means that the nucleus DNA is identical to hers and the mitochondrial DNA is that of her own ova. How can this be called a “brand new DNA strain”? It does not combine two different things, as sperm-ova reproduction does; it clones a single thing.
And yes, I do consider taking steps like taking RU-486 to force the egg to be ejected is pretty much the same thing as having an abortion.
RU-486 is completely different from the morning-after pill/ Plan B. RU-486 is given only to women who know they are pregnant and want an abortion. It kills the fetus that already has attached to the uterine wall. Women have to see a physician after using RU-486 to ensure that all of the fetus has been ejected from the body; sometimes the physician has to remove remaining fetal tissue.
The morning after pill, or “Plan B,” is simply a very high dose of regular oral contraceptive hormones. Women who already have a supply of oral contraceptive can give themselves Plan B by just taking a lot of their daily pills at once (though this method creates more side effects, especially nausea, than using a single pill formulated for this purpose). It must be taken within 72 hours of the unprotected intercourse in order to be effective.
Much like regular oral contraceptive, its first effect is to try to prevent the egg from being receptive to any sperm in the body, which is why it is most effective the earlier it is taken, before the sperm have fertilized the egg. Its secondary effect is to prevent the fertilized egg from attaching to the uterine wall, but this also is the secondary effect of oral contraceptives and IUDs (which are the most cost-efficient method of birth control; giving Chinese women good copper IUDs reduced the number of abortions tremendously).
This is why some Catholics who don’t believe in the Church’s opposition to the separation of sex and procreation (which is why the Church opposes condoms), and who are happy to use contraception, will use only contraception that works solely by keeping sperm and egg apart.
So under the belief that making the uterine wall unreceptive to the fertilized egg is the same as killing a baby, then probably most women who use non-barrier contraception — including many who consider themselves pro-life — have killed a baby, and the Human Life Amendment is just as deadly to the most common forms of women’s contraception as it is to surgical abortion and RU-486.
Non-substantively:
Thank you, PG and Kevin, for the good - and civil! - debate. (The downside of this is that I can’t pimp out my “baby moose in the sprinkler” post to make everyone feel better.)