Embryos
In 2008, after two years of failing to make a child organically, we learned the doom Kathy had already been feeling for more than a year was justified: I was diagnosed with male-factor infertility. Our only real chance to move forward would be in vitro fertilization. We couldn’t afford it; we couldn’t afford not to do it. One way we tried to work through that diagnosis, our anger, and our options was to start a secret infertility blog, “Less Than a Million.” This post and what comments from 2008 that are attached to it come from that blog.—gb
William Saletan is arguing about humanity. It seems Robert George and Christopher Tollefsen have written Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, in which they argue that the developmental process of becoming a human being is precisely what makes an embryo a human being. Saletan disagreed; George and Tollefsen responded; most recently, Saletan reiterated his original arguments at Slate. I largely agree with Saletan’s general conclusions, and his instincts may be right to emphasize the points at which embryonic development is most ambiguous. That emphasis, however, makes the whole discussion seem as if it is a quibble over details when it is in fact much more.
George and Tollefsen criticize Saletan for relying upon metaphysics to make the claim that mother and embryo function together as a system. Of course Saletan relies on metaphysics; so, too, do they:
Human embryologists focus strictly, and rightly, on the life of a developing human, and his or her developmental program. Their business is not with the biological program for humanity. From their work, we can understand when the life of a human being begins, while fully acknowledging that “human life” is transmitted and has been transmitted from human beings to new human beings from the time of the appearance of the first members of the species.
Why they would think that embryologists are the professionals to whom we should turn to define human being is a good question. Embryologists are biologists, not philosophers. Professionally, they know cells; they speculate about being on their own time. The distinction is important. It represents the real difference between George and Tollefsen and Saletan. George and Tollefsen hold to a philosophy that Saletan calls “continuous identity.” Saletan addresses it within the womb, but George and Tollefsen extend it much further:
Consider any adult human being—William Saletan, for example. He is the same whole living individual human organism—i.e., the same human being—that was at an earlier stage of his life an adolescent. And the adolescent Will was the same whole living individual human organism that was at earlier developmental stages a child, an infant, a fetus, and an embryo. By contrast, he was never an ovum or a sperm cell. The gametes whose felicitous union brought the embryonic Will Saletan into existence were parts of other organisms, his mother and father. But Will was once an embryo, just as he was once a fetus, an infant, a child, and an adolescent. From the embryonic stage forward, Will was a complete (though in the beginning developmentally immature) and distinct (both genetically and functionally) organism. He developed by an internally directed and gapless process from the embryonic into and through the infant, child, and adolescent stages and ultimately into adulthood with his organismic determinateness, distinctness, and unity intact.
Right there lies the dispute: Is Will Saletan really the same man now as he was at conception or, for that matter, at 6, 12, or 24? Are you? Am I? Perhaps I am the same organism, but I am the same. When I was 24, I was chock full of lust—it was the year Kathy and I fell in love and married—and suffering from angst about how my friends and my church would disapprove. I was in graduate school then too, studying Walt Whitman and his assertion that he was his book which was America—not just “Walt Whitman, American,” but America. He contained multitudes. At 24 I learned that our bodies are ourselves and yet they are not ourselves at all. Indeed, I would never presume to limit Saletan to being the same throughout his life. Not even on the level of his cells, since they have been completely replaced several times over since he was an embryo implanting in his mother’s womb.
In other words, George’s and Tollefsen’s metaphysical assumption is that that sapiens—that is, the act of knowing—is irrelevant to Homo sapiens. It is an assumption that confounds much of medical ethics. It is also extraordinarily limiting, which Saletan points to when he says, “I envy the authors’ philosophy. It’s wonderfully clean and rational. It just doesn’t match the messiness of biology. Each time the biology gets complicated, they have to simplify it or brush it aside and retreat back into philosophy.” Saletan reads George and Tollefsen right; unfortunately, because he sticks science, he does not offer much in place of their certainty. It would make his already strong case stronger if he did.
