Stem Cell Breakthrough

I’m as happy as anyone that scientists have found a way to create human stem cells from adult skin, and that now research on stem cells can progress without having to destroy embryos. But that doesn’t mean that the past research was wrong, immoral, or that its results should be discarded. Nor does it mean that peoples’ minds about the underlying ethics of destroying an embryo for medical research will alter. What it does mean is that this particular kind of research will now be able to progress without the ethical furor or the political blather.

Research using human embryos is always going to be morally objectionable to those who believe that human life begins at conception. Philosophically, I can see the argument — you don’t just kill people, that’s murder. Certainly by the time a baby is actually born, it is a “person;” intentionally killing a person carries the same moral gravity if the person is aged forty years or forty hours.* And it’s hard to say at what point a fetus achieves “personhood,” so the most morally safe thing to do is to say that “personhood” attaches to a person as soon as any part of that person exists; thus, from the very beginnings of independent life when sperm fertilizes egg.

But this seems so obviously over the line to me. The recently-fertilized egg is most certainly not a “person.” It lacks consciousness;** it lacks the ability to interact with the world around it; it cannot own property; it is a single cell. Yes, it possesses a unique strand of DNA and, under the right circumstances, may mature into an independent human being and thus a “person.” But the potential to become something is not the same thing as having achieved that status.

I remember reading somewhere that something like two in three fertilized eggs are ejected from the mother’s body within days of being fertilized; the fertilized egg does not attach to the wall of her womb and instead is ejected when she has her monthly cycle. That would seem to meet the definition of a “miscarriage.” Nearly every sexually active woman will have had this biological experience several times, and never realize it; some scientists theorize it is a reason why some months are inexplicably more difficult than others.

I don’t have a citation to back up that remembered “fact” and it might not actually be true. But for discussion purposes, assume that it is. Ladies, are you all of a sudden broken up because you’ve probably miscarried multiple times without even realizing you were ever pregnant? Maybe you’d be a little bit freaked out, but the emotional trauma that would come from wanting to be pregnant, knowing that you had gotten pregnant, moving along several months through the pregnancy, and then miscarrying is, and ought to be, much greater compared to what it would be if the “miscarriage” was ejecting a fertilized egg during your period, in quantity even if not also in quality.

The quantum of difference between the loss of a fertilized egg and a miscarriage five months into a pregnant woman’s term is getting at that threshold of “personhood;” the woman five months into her term has crossed that threshold and has begun to think of the being in her womb as her baby and as a person. She cries and mourns its loss — its death — after the miscarriage. But she does not cry about the ejected egg. It’s not entirely clear when that threshold was crossed; it may not even be a rational process to cross it.

I don’t pretend to know when that line gets crossed, either way. I do suggest, though, that there are cases on the extreme ends of life where the answer is clear, and that somewhere in the middle there is a gray zone. I also suggest that few people who have to deal with these kinds of questions do so lightly, and in a free society we need to respect the considered decisions of others, even if we ultimately disagree with them. That, ultimately, is why I am pro-choice despite understanding the logic of the pro-life position.

So I suggest that it will always escape external, objective analysis to define the point when that threshold is crossed such that we can say “at 12:22 p.m. on December 5, this blastocyst became a person.” But the fact that such an analysis cannot ever take place does not mean that the phenomenon does not exist. It just means that there will always be a gray area to the question.

I’m comfortable with the existence of a morally gray area in which there are no easy answers. I realize, though, that some people crave the black-and-white of moral absolutes, and some of those people have gravitated to the pro-life movement. I respect their good faith and honorable intentions in so doing, while continuing to disagree with their analysis, and the issues they raise are worthy of serious exploration and contemplation by people of all opinions.

That is, the issues they raise are worthy of serious consideration, although the politics associated with those issues are not always as deserving of intellectual recognition. What was disturbing about the stem cell debate, before this week’s innovation, was the fervor with which the pro-life side advanced its position — stem cell research was inherently immoral, and all of the fruits of that tree would be similarly poisoned because no amount of scientific knowledge and new medical treatments could possibly outweigh the terrible cost of that kind of irresponsible “research.” Godwin’s Law had been seriously in play for more than a year. Now that the moral gravity of this kind of research has been dramatically altered, the pro-life camp must perforce abruptly change its tune.

Along the way, they have proclaimed a great moral victory, because now, people will be able to divorce the moral gravity of killing a human embryo from the stunning potential of this avenue of research. I doubt that is true, though. I know I certainly haven’t been persuaded that I had been wrong before, and the great good news of the new way of making stem cells seems to be that now it will be much easier for scientists to do it. The fact that now we can make stem cells this way does not mean that the scientists who had harvested embryos for their research had been wrong all along — what if this new technique had proven impractical or failed outright?

A scientific breakthrough does not change the moral calculus of what the scientist is doing, is what I’m saying. If stem cell research was wrong before, it’s wrong now; if it was justified before, it’s justified now.

Yes, I know the argument was never again stem cell research itself. Rather, it was that the manner of stem cell research objectionable. We can study human anatomy by dissecting corpses, and doing so is a good thing — but killing people for the purpose of collecting their corpses would still be bad. But as I hope I’ve demonstrated above, harvesting an embryo is not necessarily an act that carries the same moral gravity as killing an adult human being. Remember the pregnant woman who miscarries has different emotional reactions to the miscarriage based on when in the pregnancy the miscarriage took place; so too is our emotional reaction to the harvesting of a few cells different than the harvesting of a fully-developed organ out of the body of an otherwise-viable human being.

So it’s simply wrong from the pro-life crowd to proclaim a moral victory. No moral issues have been resolved and the gray area hasn’t gone away — science has instead given us a way to sidestep confronting the moral issue. The pro-lifers should be heaving a great sigh of relief because they no longer have to make a choice between the advances of science and the dictates of their morality. We all should be relieved; not every moral quandary gets a resolution like this.

* Historically, not all societies have felt this way. For much of human history, infants were frequently abandoned to die of exposure, in a variety of acts that we would today call “murder.” Our ancestors — people of all sorts of religious, ethnic, and geographic backgrounds — distinguished their acts of exposing infants from other kinds of killing, and constructed moral justifications for their actions which they considered very powerful.

** By the same token, a person whose brain has ceased to function and whose consciousness has vanished, never to return, has lost something essential about his “personhood.” If I am ever in such an unfortunate position — pull the plug. Make sure I’m not coming back, of course, but once that’s certain, don’t waste another penny of your money or the time of medical personnel who could be doing some good for other people. I do not ever want to be Terry Schiavo. Use this blog entry as evidence of my wishes.