In today's Post appeared a concise account of the history of perspectives on the beginning of life. For those who are interested:
Changing Conceptions
You'd Be Amazed at Who Thought What and When and Why
By Rick Weiss
Sunday, July 15, 2001; Page B01
With this week's twin revelations that Virginia scientists had made fresh human embryos solely to harvest their stem cells and Massachusetts researchers were creating cloned human embryos for the same utilitarian end, President Bush is under more pressure than ever to answer the question he's been mulling for months: Should he allow federal funding of research on cells derived from human embryos?
The relevant facts are straightforward enough. Embryonic stem cells, which are tucked inside 1-week-old human embryos, appear to be the perfect raw material from which scientists could craft treatments for a wide range of diseases. And in order to get them, embryos must be destroyed.
But those two simple truths are forcing the president and the nation to contemplate with dizzying immediacy the profound mystery of our own genesis, the timeless question of when a human life begins, and our feelings about the moral standing of the human embryo.
As a Christian, Bush has said, he believes that life begins at conception. No news there. That's an age-old tenet of Christianity, right?
Hardly.
In fact, the story of when human life begins has a remarkably fickle history. Even theseemingly unwavering Catholic church, it turns out, did not come to its current conclusion that a new embryo is a full-blown human entity until 1869. Before that, its views on life's beginnings changed several times, as have the views of scientists, philosophers and legal scholars.
Our sense of when life begins -- and its related conclusions about the embryo's moral standing -- have always been a product of the tension between moral sensibilities and scientific knowledge, and our feelings and conclusions have changed considerably over time.
Now, in the post-Dolly era, the old tale that human life depends on the union of sperm and egg is going the way of the stork and the cabbage patch. And jarring as this reality may be, it's something that we and our political leaders will have to assimilate as we decide anew what, exactly, embryos are -- and the relative merits of protecting them versus using them to improve the health of the already born.
In the beginning, of course, and for a long time after, there was no science to muddle the picture. Centuries before the discovery of sperm or egg, Aristotle declared that women contributed matter and men contributed motion. And the new person who was the product of that cosmic fusion did not really exist until that union manifested as "quickening" -- the first noticeable movements in a woman's womb.
Having no access to today's sensitive pregnancy tests, Aristotle had no way of knowing that quickening generally occurs about 20 weeks into pregnancy. He reckoned that quickening -- and therefore personhood -- happened 40 days into pregnancy if the fetus was a boy, and 80 or 90 days after conception if it was a girl (a time difference that reflected his view that girls were simply defective boys). Anything that happened before then did not matter. And had anyone sought to do stem cell research in those days, they would not have heard an argument from Aristotle.
The 40-day rule was picked up by the major religions, and in some traditions it has stood relatively unchanged. Jewish and Muslim scholars today teach that embryos up to 40 days old are no different than water, and can be disposed of or experimented upon without moral consequence.
For Catholics, however, everything changed in 1588, when Pope Sixtus V declared that contraception and abortion were mortal sins. The implication was that "ensoulment," the infusion of a soul into the newly created being, occurred at conception, not at 40 days. The penalty for these crimes was excommunication.
Just three years later, Pope Gregory XIV brought the church back to the view of delayed animation and ensoulment. And that position stood until 1869 when Pope Pius IX renewed the call for excommunication for abortion at any stage. Since then, the mainstream position of the Catholic Church has been that the soul infuses the embryo from the moment of conception.
Trade in those papal robes for white lab coats, and you'll find that scientists have been just as capricious as the church in the matter of deciding what constitutes a person. It started in the 17th century, when Anton van Leeuwenhoek took a gander at some semen under thenewly invented microscope and, to his amazement, "discovered" that each sperm contained a pre-formed person -- complete, he proclaimed, with a persisting soul that "animated" that body. In that view, sperm were arguably as precious as 40-day-old embryos, while women merely contributed the fertile and furrowed ground to nourish the little homunculus to its full human potential.
Science and religious doctrine found a new point of contention after German scientist Karl Ernst von Baer discovered the human egg, or ovum, in 1827 -- laying the groundwork for modern embryology. Embryos, scientists realized, have the capacity to divide into two during the first few weeks of development, creating identical twins. By contrast, souls had long been declared to be indivisible. If one embryo could become two, then surely ensoulment must occur after an embryo's last opportunity to twin. Today this remains one of the fundamental sticking points between scientists who believe it is acceptable to conduct stem cell research on 1-week-old embryos and those who equate such work with murder.
In recent decades, the advent of new medical technology has in some ways exacerbated our mixed feelings about who or what an embryo or early fetusis and how deserving those pre-people are of our respect, our affections and, in particular, our protection. In general, modern medicine's successful war against miscarriage and infant mortalityhas allowed parents -- who in many cultures had delayed even naming their children until well after birth because of the high odds of perinatal death -- to feel attached to their unborn progeny as they never dared before. And like the astronaut's first pictures of mother Earth from space, which gave rise to an almost palpable maternal tug among all who viewed them, Lennart Nilsson's stunning color photos of early human fetuses in the mid-'60s inspired new levels of compassion for our seemingly weightless primordial precursors.
Ultrasound devices that allow parents to see their fetuses within weeks of conception have also strengthened the emotional bond to the unborn -- though at the same time, says Baruch College sociologist Barbara Katz Rothman, the availability of amniocentesis and other prenatal tests has encouraged a certain forestallment of attachment on the part of mothers who would be willing to consider abortion if their baby wasn't healthy.
Religious teaching clashed with scientific fact as never before when it was discovered that babies are not just begotten inside mothers but can be created in vitro, or "in glass." That was in 1978, when Louise Brown was born -- the first baby to have spent the earliest days of her embryonic life in a laboratory dish.
In vitro fertilization forced humanity to reconsider yet again how it would regard and respect the embryo, which for the first time found itself in the strange situation of being able to live but not really to grow. That conundrum has today allowed some conservative politicians like Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) to come to the conclusion that it is possible to be both opposed to abortion and in favor of embryo destruction in the furtherance of stem cell research.
In a carefully reasoned letter he recently sent to Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, Hatch argued that an embryo in a laboratory dish is expendable -- at least for a purpose as promising as stem cell research -- because the embryo has no capacity to develop into a person in that dish. Only after an embryo is transferred to a woman's womb, Hatch wrote, is that natural capacity to become a person attained, and only then does the government gain an interest in protecting that entity.
His views echo the old theme of delayed ensoulment and reflect the writings of more recent philosophers, who have posited a distinction between "possible" people and "potential" people. "While in the dish it is a 'possible' human being, but things must be done and decisions made for it to become a 'potential' human being, where it can develop on its own," said Carol Tauer, a philosopher and bioethicist with the Minnesota Center for Health Care Ethics in Minneapolis.
Most recently, the birth of Dolly the sheep upped the ante again in our ongoing quest to place value on our cellular precursors. The paradigm-shaking lesson from cloning is that one doesn't even need a sexually produced embryo to make a member of the next generation. A single skin cell, the kind that every human sheds by the thousands every day, is a potential person if manipulated properly.
No one is talking about giving last rites to each of those possible people circling the shower drain. But many people who have aggressively defended the moral standing of embryos are now wondering whether the product of cloning -- which looks like an embryo but has very different biological roots than a standard issue, sperm-sparked embryo -- deserves the same moral weight.
Some scientists and ethicists involved in cloning research have sought to solve the problem by resorting to a semantic argument and calling for that early product of cloning to be given a name different from "embryo," in an attempt, in their view, to make the debate more rational and scientific. Ann Kieffling, a Harvard professor who sits on the ethics advisory board for Advanced Cell Technology, a Massachusetts company doing human embryo cloning research, has come up with the word "ovasome" as a name for the embryo-like entity created by cloning. The word is a blend of the roots for "egg" and "body." Michael West, the company's president and chief executive, likes the scientifically more accurate but definitely less catchy "nuclear transfer-derived blastocyst."
It's not surprising to find the old supporters of instant personhood deriding such efforts as blatant obfuscation. "This is Orwell. This is newspeak," says University of Chicago ethicist Leon Kass. "Let's call things by their true names. If you're going to sin, let's sin bravely." The word "embryo" works just fine.
In the end, of course, what matters is not whether science, religion or intuition is right. What matters is that public policy decisions, like the one that Bush is preparing to make, accommodate as much as possible the diverse and ever-changing sensibilities of the citizenry.
Strange things can happen when religious views get incorporated into law. The preamble to Missouri's anti-abortion statute, for example, explicitly declares that human life begins "at the moment of conception." Weirdly, the Missouri Supreme Court has said that the language now applies to all Missouri laws -- a ruling that has wreaked havoc in cases where people have claimed, for example, to be eligible for a driver's license nine months earlier than their age would suggest.
But simply going with the science can be just as unnerving. A panel of scientists in 1968 declared that the old definition of death -- the time when the heart has irreversibly stopped -- was too narrow, and introduced the concept of "brain death," which has made its way into law despite some people's fears that it has provided an excuse to declare as dead some people being "kept alive" on life support.
We and our president will have to listen carefully to our still-beating hearts if we are to understand, and give proper meaning to, the earliest echoes of our lives -- echoes that date back not just to our births, not just to our embryonic roots, but far, far back to the first conglomerations of life on Earth. The continuum of life has indeed been continuous. The landmarks are for us to define.
Rick Weiss writes about science for The Washington Post.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company |
