Is Jane Maienschein correct that chimerism and genetic mosaicism undercut the proposed Sanctity of Human Life Act of 2013, or Personhood Amendment? Or is Ramesh Ponnuru correct that genetic oddities have no bearing on it?
The Sanctity of Human Life Act of 2013 declares that “each human life begins with fertilization, cloning, or its functional equivalent, at which time every human has all legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood.” This is based in part on the idea that once fertilization has occurred, the person’s future identity is determined. From there, it’s just a straight line to birth, development, old age, and death. It’s arbitrary to pick some later moment in time to say that life has begun. But, in some cases, who the person will be (including what kind of DNA they will ultimately have) is not determined until later. For Ms. Maienschein, this presents a logical and philosophical challenge to the premise that life begins at fertilization and complicates the effort to confer “all legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood” onto a freshly fertilized egg. Does a chimera (where one twin has absorbed another) get two votes?
Mr. Ponnuru, however, isn’t interested in such complexities because he doesn’t think that they have any moral significance. The principle is that once an egg has been fertilized it is wrong to interfere in the development of that egg. If one egg subsumes the other, then one life is lost and no one is to blame. You don’t consider the resulting baby to be a murderer.
A living member of the species Homo sapiens in the embryonic stage of development can be treated as a person in the sense of its being wrong to act to bring about the end of its life, without being treated as having culpability for anything at all. The same is true of a member of the human species in the infant stage of development: You don’t hold them responsible for anything they do, but they’re still persons with the right not to be killed.
And the legislation Maienschein discusses, whatever its merits in general, is invulnerable to her objection because it stipulates that the life of a human being “begins with fertilization, cloning, or its functional equivalent.” The formation of a chimera could involve three fertilization or fertilization-equivalent events: the formation of each initial embryo, and then their combination into a new human embryo. At no point would it be proper, from the perspective of the pro-life law under discussion, to kill any of these human embryos. From that perspective there were two human lives worth protecting, which then ended and were replaced by a new human life worth protecting. He or she should get one vote, eventually.
Mr. Ponnuru’s stance makes sense, but it doesn’t wrestle with the philosophical questions. Much more interesting than embryonic voting rights is the relationship between life and identity. Can it be said that your life really began prior to your genetic code being determined and finalized? No one says that your life began when ovulation occurred, or when the father’s sperm began their competitive journey. The reason that the moment of fertilization feels like a compelling point to say that life begins is precisely because that is the moment when the genetic components are combined and cell division begins to occur. If you happen to be religious, this is when a new soul is created, a blessed and unique individual.
But the truth is that embryonic development isn’t that simple, and embryos may swap genetic material with the mother or a twin. What seemed like a magical determinative moment wasn’t necessarily quite that.
At the same time, I can understand Mr. Ponnuru’s principle, which is pretty basic: don’t interfere with the process of embryonic development because you will be ending a process that could result in a live baby.
Even if you’re willing to go along with Ponnuru’s principle, the questions raised by Maienschein are relevant to whether certain methods of birth control constitute ending a life.
All this is very interesting from a chin-stroking perspective – and also painfully divorced from the real world, where the rights of a mother – who may or may not have even consented to having a “human being” implanted in her – really ought to at least get mentioned in the discussion.
They don’t here, for the simple reason that to the religious nut jobs pushing what only a few years ago were considered unthinkably radical and anti-scientific ideas, the rights of human beings begin at conception, and end at birth. (Unless, perhaps, you have the able-bodied, wealthy straight white male DNA favored by God.)
When life begins and a “person” should be conferred with human and constitutional rights is a contentious issue, but science can clarify the discussion without resolving it definitively.
Of course, debating abortion rights strictly on this turf does leave out the mother. That’s because the question of whether a mother should be able to end the “life” of her pregnancy is a separate issue.
I don’t think most pro-choicers agree with Ponnuru’s definition of when life begins, but they also don’t agree that it’s necessarily morally wrong to interfere with embryonic development under certain circumstances (which also are contentious). So, the debate in this article is just one small piece of a greater ethical debate.
That’s the point: when life begins is a separate issue, but it’s also one that has no relevance and is a pointless exercise in philosophical wanking. I don’t care if you’re a living and breathing human being who needs blood. No one can force me to give blood to save your life, even if I was the one responsible for the predicament.
Personhood, in other words, is irrelevant to the abortion issue.
I suppose, but I think what’s most important is that a fetal personhood amendment would foreclose the whole debate. It would write the most extreme anti-choice position into the Constitution, and after that there really isn’t much to discuss.
In that sense, Ponnuru’s response to Maienschein is entirely correct: It just doesn’t matter. Split all the hairs you want, you can’t have an abortion.
This is, after, the very same position that Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock were defending when they made their spectacularly outrageous comments about rape: no abortion under any circumstances. The only thing that really needs to be said about the Sanctity of Human Life Act is “Hell no!”
Then you have to refuse to debate on those terms. What Maienschein wants to do is kind of interesting from an abstract standpoint but the only way to deal with these people practically is to reject their premises: it’s not a biological issue but a social one, and the argument over when life begins isn’t relevant (it’s relevant to an individual priest arguing with an individual woman in his congregation, if you like, but it’s not to the making of secular laws). The question ought to be, when does society become responsible for this creature, and the only possible answer is when it’s separated from its host, when it becomes effectively a social person.
How did this become the conservative position:
Exceeding odd that the anti-science “conservatives” have in such a few short years embraced cloning and in-vitro fertilization. Nothing natural about artificial reproduction. As if there is a shortage of human beings on earth because God is stingy with human eggs and sperm. How he must weep at all the fertilized human eggs that fail in their descent through fallopian tubes and fail to attach in the uterus.
This is as tedious, boring, and irrelevant as debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Conceptually playing god is for narcissists and fools.
Ponnuru’s church still forbids IV fertilization as absolutely as it ever did. The purpose of this argument is to pretend it isn’t religious and keep the Holy Rollers (who traditionally didn’t care about any of this stuff and still don’t object to IVF) on board. “Why no, it’s just universal morality! Don’t you care about life?”
The problem with that formulation isn’t biological. The problem is a legal one, i.e., awarding legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood.
Legally, it’s absurd to try to attribute personhood rights to an entity that cannot exist independently from its living female host-person. The only way the fertilized egg can be conceived of as a legal “person” is if you’ve cauterized and scraped away the female host-person’s legal rights and attributes. Legal rights and attributes such as the “right not to be killed” (aka the right to be left alone aka the right to privacy and personal autonomy) as well as liberty and freedom are protected by law for individuals but lose all meaning when applied to zygotes and embryos.
How nonsensical is it to speak of “liberty” or “the pursuit of happiness” for a zygote that must be anchored and fed in the uterine lining of its host before it develops into a still totally dependent embryo? Since there is no chance for the fertilized egg to become an independent living being without 24 weeks of total dependence on a female person’s co-operation such concepts (strained as they must be regarding zygotes) must logically revolve around the female host’s choices.
The whole “personhood” drama is another contrived RW emotionally distorted mishmash of magical talk of souls with biological and legal concepts that they either don’t or refuse to understand properly. Their insincerity is revealed when they ignore or reject even their Holy Bible’s teaching on this matter – that “life” begins with the drawing of breath.
Who knew? Opportunistic misogyny even trumps the Bible.
The idea of considering a zygote an individual with attendant rights is patently absurd. Period.
None of this addresses the real political question: Is there a right to life after birth? What is the obligation of society to ensure that right to life? What infrastructure needs to be in place to support that political obligation?
An excellent example of straining at gnats and swallowing camels.
Well, the right wing likes to label things they don’t like/agree with.
Let’s start calling their position “right to birth”, since they clearly don’t give a shit about what happens the second after.
What bothers me most is your use of Mr. It sounds like stilted NYT bullshit and you don’t even use Ms. for Maienschein consistently. Suddenly that piece of offal rates a special honorific?
And if this newly-designated “citizen” happens to take up residence in your uterus, well, that’s not Mr. Ponnuru’s concern.