The Embryonic Stem Cell Debate Is About Destroying Embryonic Human Lives
The main moral issues surrounding embryonic stem cell research (ESCR) are relatively easy to understand: Should embryos be used in research practices that destroy them? Should our society cooperate in this practice through government funding? Recall how ESCR works: Scientists obtain embryos leftover from IVF procedures or create them, then “isolate” stem cells by moving them, a procedure that destroys those embryos. This practice raises a classic question: Do the ends justify whatever means may be necessary to achieve them? Some say “yes,” that the great benefits of ESCR justify the destruction of human embryos. Others say “no,” that no menu of benefits justifies killing human lives, especially the billions that would be sacrificed both to perfect the research and then to produce regenerative therapies and tissues.
Although the main moral issues are easy to present, the moral debate is very complicated. It is easy to see why. Members of my own family have died of cancer, Alzheimer’s, and heart disease; one of my relatives currently has Parkinson’s. I would love to see someone invent a cure for any one of these diseases. Our families’ stories evoke both fear and joy, the fear of death and the joy of living. Emotions such as these shared across entire societies can spark great creativity and community. But it must also be said that the same emotions have led just as easily to tragic rationalizations and to practices that consume human lives. Research that destroys embryos offers a striking example. How can society tell the difference between ingenuity and rationalization, benefit and destruction? The difference is typically found in the means that people employ to pursue social benefits. In the case of ESCR, society agrees upon the goals of this new scientific knowledge and therapy, but not upon the way to achieve its benefits, i.e., should we as a society permit, and even condone, the destruction of human embryos?
In order to grasp the morality of this research more clearly, consider how human death might legitimately be involved in the pursuit of social benefit. For example, soldiers and police risk their own lives in order to protect their societies from aggression. Furthermore, if a policeman shoots to kill a would-be murderer, people presume the situation required lethal force in order to stop the aggression. Similarly, the rules of war permit killing to disable combatants. In all these situations, ethical principles limit killing, as a last resort, to what is necessary to stop aggression. In these examples, death occurs because people, and perhaps society itself, are already under attack. Justice requires that if one person plans to cause the death of another, then the attacker should die before he kills. By halting aggression, death is legitimately involved in the pursuit of social benefit.
It is also true that human death might be legitimately involved in the pursuit of social benefit even when no one is trying to kill anyone else; i.e. when all parties are innocent of wrong-doing. For example, organ donors prolong the lives of others by providing vital organs after their deaths. Someone dies naturally and then society benefits, one organ recipient at a time. Historically, organ transplantation has been governed by the “dead donor rule,” which means what it says: “Wait until a potential donor is dead before removing his or her vital organs.” Over the past few years, however, there have been proposals to abandon the dead donor rule if the potential donor is going to die anyway. Then a potential donor could consent to donate his or her organs before death. In this practice, a medical team causes the death of an innocent, albeit willing, person in pursuit of a social benefit, transplantable organs. By causing the death of an innocent person, however, this practice crosses a moral boundary similar to the one posed by ESCR…and generates the same type of debate. Everyone agrees that increasing the supply of transplantable organs benefits society, but not upon the means: Causing the death of an innocent person.
Removing vital organs from a living donor is very similar to isolating stem cells from a living embryo; both actions involve causing death to benefit society. Regenerative therapies, basic research, drug testing, and disease modeling in real human tissue are all great goals. No one is against stem cell research; some oppose causing death in the process. One of the most persuasive arguments for ESCR claims: “Spare” human embryos are “going to die anyway,” therefore they ought to be used for research. But what is this argument really saying? It is certainly saying “if an embryo’s death is imminent, then society can permit scientists to kill that embryo,” but it actually goes even further, effectively saying that people may expose embryos to death so that they may be killed.
If people were truly concerned about the deaths of research embryos, they would argue against exposing them to death in the first place by producing them in IVF clinics. Anyone who supports ESCR because “spare” embryos are “going to die anyway” inevitably condones an ongoing supply of research embryos. Human embryo research becomes dependent upon an IVF industry that deliberately creates more embryos than its clients usually need, necessarily intending the destruction of some of them. Recall that only a few of the five to 10 embryos routinely created are actually implanted and those that are not frozen for future use are discarded, their lives aborted. So-called therapeutic cloning or SCNT will not resolve this problem because it too creates embryos for destruction.
Human Embryos Are Human Lives
By now, some proponents of ESCR might be troubled by my assumption that embryos are human lives. Some will claim that is a “philosophical” or “religious opinion” and they will say that no one can know for sure whether embryos really become human lives. For example, during the 2008 presidential campaign, Tom Brokaw asked then Senator Joseph Biden about the beginning of human life, and the Senator said:
Look, I know when it begins for me. It's a personal and private issue. For me, as a Roman Catholic, I'm prepared to accept the teachings of my church. But let me tell you. There are an awful lot of people of great confessional faiths – Protestants, Jews, Muslims and others – who have a different view. They believe in God as strongly as I do. They're as intensely as religious as I am religious. They believe in their faith and they believe in human life, and they have differing views as to when life [begins].
Is the beginning of a human life the article of faith that Biden claims it is? Are there really no commonly accepted criteria at all by which to form a judgment? Can we not identify scientific data and ethical principles to judge whether a certain medical practice causes the death of an innocent in order to achieve social benefit? As President Obama signs his executive order, he is certainly able to evaluate the most probable points at which a life could begin, and he is certainly right to look to science, philosophy, and theology for guidance.
Let’s start with two simple, commonly accepted principles and say that reasonable criteria for determining the beginning of a human life must, in justice, apply equally to all individuals and incorporate all relevant, available scientific data. If one listens to today’s public debate, one notices several possible points at which people say a new, individual human life begins:
The moment when a sperm enters the egg to form a new, single fertilized cell, called a zygote. This is the moment of conception or sperm-egg fusion.
When the parents’ genetic material, once separate within the zygote, fuse to form the genome of the child. This point occurs about 24 hours after sperm-egg fusion and is called syngamy.
When the embryo implants in the womb, i.e. implantation.
When the fetus can survive outside the womb, i.e. viability.
Birth.
When someone, usually the mother, says the person exists.
If life begins at one of the first two points—either sperm-egg fusion or syngamy, then isolating cells from an embryo is killing that life. If life begins later, there are two options: Either an embryo is technically not yet a life and can be destroyed, or it is becoming a human life and ought not to be destroyed. Let’s look briefly at each of these points of human development, moving from latest to earliest:
To say that a human life begins when the mother claims it does subjects the embryo to its mother’s whim, does not treat all individuals equally, and ignores scientific data.
Birth, which should apply in all situations, also turns out to be problematic. Some argue that a human being exists at birth, or at least has rights, because the child now lives independently of its mother’s body. The problem with this argument is that the child could live independently of its mother’s body if it had been born earlier.
That’s why some people point to “viability” as the important characteristic, because before that point the child cannot survive outside the womb. But viability changes as new technologies enable babies to live outside the womb earlier, so it doesn’t seem fair to tie the beginning of life to such a moving target.
So consider the point of implantation. Some people note that prior to implantation, the embryo could divide into twins and then argue that this embryo must not therefore be an individual. In other words, how can an individual life begin before implantation when that embryo could still cleave, creating two lives instead of one? The answer is that twins arise when one preexisting individual cleaves into two. In other words, the preexisting embryo is a human individual that later becomes two by the rare form of individuation called twinning. This embryo, after all, directs its own development from within according to a genetic profile that is already established.
Next consider syngamy, which occurs about 24 hours after sperm and egg unite and is considered the end of fertilization. At syngamy, the individual’s unique genetic code is complete in a single cell. That cell is ready to divide and develop an embryonic body. If we could run a test at this point, we would know whether the person is likely to develop a genetic disability or how disposed that person might be to cancer. Therefore, syngamy represents a reasonable option for the beginning of a human life. There are, however, two problems with syngamy. First, genetic identity is not the whole of individuality because even at this early stage, other factors (e.g. mitochondrial DNA) inside the zygote also determine how an individual develops. Second, syngamy itself occurs within an entity (the zygote) that already exists. So, if individuality is more than just DNA and if syngamy occurs within a previously existing entity, how can syngamy be the beginning of a unique individual?
Lastly, consider the beginning of fertilization, the fusion of sperm and egg. In “When Does Human Life Begin? A Scientific Perspective,” biologist Maureen Condic argues that a zygote, formed from the union of sperm and egg, contains everything needed for a mature human body to develop from that single cell: “From the moment of sperm-egg fusion, a human zygote acts as a complete whole, with all the parts of the zygote interacting in an orchestrated fashion to generate the structures and relationships required for the zygote to continue developing towards its mature state.” (p. 7) So even though it consists of just one cell, the zygote contains all the information necessary to convert itself into a live-born infant and eventually, a mature adult. Thus, fusion of egg and sperm is, by scientific criteria, a reasonable standard for the beginning of a human life. It applies equally to all situations and respects the scientific definition of an organism.
This brief survey shows that judgments about when a human life begins need not be mere opinions, never mind matters of religious faith. Justice demands standards that apply equally to all, and science demands that biological data about the human body be respected. No one can deny that every human who has ever lived began as an embryo. It is clear that mature human development can only come from the union of sperm and egg or now, theoretically, from cloning. We can also identify practices that stop that development, such as the “isolation” of stem cells. Some people refuse to call this “death.” Yet the principle of equality wedded to existing scientific knowledge provides us with standards, for example, that call into question abortion, any arbitrary 14-day life limit for a clone, and prolonging that limit in order to harvest cells from a fetus. In fact, those standards rationally lead to the conclusion that embryos should not be killed from the moment of fertilization onwards.