The Human Rights of Pinhead-Sized People
by Jim Walters | 14 March 2024 |
The Supreme Court in the American state of Alabama recently made history when it ruled that human embryos have the same moral human status as do you, dear reader of this article. That’s as astounding as it is historic!
The court was morally right in seeing the value of all human entities—just wrong in valuing all humans equally.
Alabama Chief Justice Tom Parker, unabashedly a strident conservative Christian, cast his concurring opinion in religious terms: “Even before birth all human beings have the image of God…Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God.” Tony Perkins, president, pro-life Family Research Council, pronounced the Alabama decision: “A beautiful defense of life.”
“The Alabama ruling gave the pro-life movement the closest thing in fifty years to what it has been striving for,” according to Daniel K. Williams, an Ohio historian who has written three books on evangelical activism.
The decision
Just how did the Alabama Supreme Court get to this epochal ruling? The case began when an Alabama family sued when a hospital patient accidentally caused a set of human embryos to spill onto the floor, thus destroying embryos belonging to the offended family. The case went to two lower courts, both ruling that the family/embryo lacked legal standing. The case was appealed to the state’s highest court.
The Alabama Supreme Court cited a 1872 state statute, “Wrongful Death of a Minor Act,” thus allowing the family to sue over the wrongful death of their “child.” The court, in an 8:1 ruling, interpreted minor or child to include “unborn children,” and further to include “extrauterine children”—back to a 24-cell embryo.
Chief Justice Parker and his colleagues are reflecting an ancient human sentiment in their ruling: that human life, per se, is morally valuable—and they are correct. A human embryo, essentially a fertilized egg, is as thoroughly human in its DNA or basic germinal composition as an adult. A microbiologist, microscope in hand, could verify such identity. It’s this understanding that led contemporary Protestant thinker Scott Klusendorf to claim that although an embryo lacks functional ability, it “is nonetheless a person because he or she has a human nature from the moment of existence.”
That human nature possesses an eternal, divine essence goes back two-thousand-plus years—to Plato, Thomas Aquinas, Rene Descartes, Immanuel Kant, and on to more recent Vatican pronouncements. Thus, the pro-life movement of today has a distinguished history.
Why does the recent Alabama Supreme Court decision seem so out-of-step with today’s mainstream thinking?
Blame contemporary knowledge. Blame science, and its ability to apply new knowledge. Finally, blame an educated public that questions old authorities. We want to make our own sense of the new data.
For example, take semen and its union with an egg. We now know that the size of a fertilized egg, a single-celled “human”—is about the size of a small pinhead. Bible writers of 3,000+ years ago thought semen had magical powers—so beware! (see Leviticus 22:4).
Ancient peoples imagined the growing intrauterine “baby,” and compared it to different seeds. Now we accurately know the age associated with those organic images of old: a 4-week embryo = a poppy seed in size; a 5-weeker = a sesame seed; a 6 weeker = a lentil; a 7-weeker = a blueberry. You get the idea.
IVF
IVF, or in vitro fertilization, is a medical procedure that extracts multiple eggs from a donor, fertilizes them, then freezes them. When needed, they are tested and the most healthy two or three are transferred, with the hope that at least one will thrive.
This procedure is relatively new. Early on it was controversial, but is now widely accepted and meeting a broadly and deeply felt need. Recent polls show that 85% of the American public, and 78% of pro-life advocates, favor IVF. There is a significant market, given that the infertility rate is 11% among women and 9% among men. It’s currently estimated that 2% of births in the United States involve IVF.
Former vice president Mike Pence, an unabashed evangelical, in 2022 admitted that he and his wife Karen had utilized IVF. He argued that such procedures are so beneficial that they “deserve the protection of the law.” Current House Speaker Mike Johnson is a co-sponsor of the Life at Conception Act, a bill that in its current form would rein in IVF. Nevertheless, Johnson recently stated that he is “working to protect life and ensure that IVF treatment is available.”
Yet consider IVF’s inherent destruction of nascent human life. Approximately 1.5 million frozen embryos are stored across the country. A small fraction of these will result in men and women like us. Of those examined in a laboratory Petri dish, only those found to be most healthy will be transferred, the others destroyed. After several years, hundreds of thousands of unused frozen embryos are destroyed or used for scientific advances.
Today, almost all bioethicists and embryologists favor therapeutic experimentation and use of embryonic tissues. Some specialists have estimated that up to 128 million Americans might be treated for a wide variety of ills. (Significantly, due to public pressure the Alabama legislature, three weeks after the Supreme Court’s ruling, pushed through a bill legally protecting IVF specialists, because so many were prepared to close shop.)
It’s noteworthy that one’s theology and philosophy can be one thing, and one’s practical life quite another. Pence and Johnson desire the personal comfort and political image of being fervently pro-life. However, they also want the benefits of an advanced medical technology such as IVF—a societal advance at odds with a strict pro-life ideology.
Personhood
In my academic life as a bioethicist I have given considerable thought to personhood and its relationship to the fetus, and even pre-embryonic tissues. In What Is a Person? I advocated the idea of “proximate personhood”: the closer an embryo-fetus is to undisputed personhood, such as held by the reader of this essay, the greater its claim to life. Rather than the black/white, person/non-person thinking behind the recent Alabama Supreme Court decision, my approach is deliberately developmental.
I suggest three developmental phases of escalating personhood:
- Potential for full personhood. The human embryo is unlike any other tissue on earth: after implantation, given normal development, it has the potential to develop into human adulthood.
- Development toward full personhood. Strictly speaking, even a newborn is not a “moral agent,” in that the newborn—just like the embryo–isn’t self-determining. But we know there’s a difference: the more closely the developing embryo/fetus approximates a mature individual, the greater its bestowed personhood. Of course, a newborn has and should have identical legal standing as you and I do.
- Bonding of full persons with the developing fetus. Maternal “quickening” makes a moral difference—the pregnant woman’s feeling/sensing of her offspring within at 18+ weeks. The woman’s and/or society’s emotional/social bonding to the developing fetus increases until birth and beyond.
If we truly value human life, we will exercise common sense in distinguishing between the moral and legal status of an embryo, a viable fetus, and a newborn.
Jim Walters is professor emeritus of the Loma Linda University School of Religion.
