The journal
Nature declined to print my letter to the editor, so I'm going to post it here for the benefit of my readers. In their polite rejection letter, they claimed that they have to be very selective due to space considerations. That may be, but this week
they published four Correspondences compared with last week's dozen or so. All four had to do with science funding levels; none were about embryonic stem cell research, the subject of my letter. First, I quote at length from
the letter that merited my response:
...The controversial and moral question of when human life actually begins is the basis of limitations placed on work such as somatic-cell nuclear transfer or the derivation of new cell lines from embryos discarded from in vitro fertilization procedures. On 29 May 2008, the Brazilian Supreme Court approved legislation allowing stem-cell research. One of the arguments for this approval is that embryos that have already been frozen would never be implanted in the uterus.
Although many people affirm that human life begins when the sperm is impregnated into the egg, either naturally or artificially, they ignore the role of the uterus. Human status is attributed by some to 5-day-old embryos, which consequently would receive the same protection rights as any person. Do frozen and/or inviable embryos, which could never be implanted in a maternal uterus, deserve this status? To begin the process of forming a living human, there must be connection of an embryo to a mother's epithelial cells. This requires the interaction of the embryo with the endometrium (the wall of the uterus).
The Brazilian constitution states that the civil rights of a person begin at the moment of live birth. The law extends these neonate rights from the moment of conception — but only if the baby is born alive. A fertilized egg that is not implanted in the uterus is neither a neonate nor a person. According to traditional Roman law: "Nasciturus pro iam nato habetur, quotiens de commodis eius agitur", which translates as "The unborn child is treated as a child already born in all things respecting its interests". This was presumably conditional on its being born alive. If not, then this protection becomes obsolete.
For a human being to exist and to benefit from civil protection laws, the uterus is a crucial component.
My response follows, edited for the blog only slightly:
SIR: [This letter] is replete with facile and pernicious arguments. First, for what purpose are “leftover” human embryos (which have their own unique DNA) to be frozen at all? Has it not
always been that people were rightly squeamish about destroying human organisms which
could potentially later be implanted in a womb? [M. Z. Hemingway made the same point at GetReligion,
in the comment thread.]
Secondly: Any law stating that “the civil rights of a person begin at live birth” is absurd from the outset because the moment of birth is, not to put too fine a point on it, a
complete fluke. In particular: At which point during the baby’s traversal of the birth canal does it count as a “live birth”? When the head emerges? What if the child is breech? What about C-sections? More broadly, if a mother has a C-section scheduled for March 13, does the baby have no human rights on March 12, even though she could have been born prematurely, say on March 1, and easily survived?
Thirdly: Far and away their worst contention is that the protections of law for unborn children become somehow retroactively obsolete
if the child is not in fact born alive. In that case, there are plainly no protections at all! If the argument hinges on the “intent” to bring the baby to birth, I strenuously object: Since when do a third party’s fickle intentions determine a first party’s personhood? Such an argument is useful only in defending odious practices like slavery, and the wanton destruction of human organisms is of the same order of enormity.
I do not care one whit about the putative (and still unproven) “utility” of embryo-destroying research. Harvesting organs from day-old infants could prove “useful”, as could enslaving an identical twin of yourself so as to have a backup of your body, and I trust that we are not yet so far gone as a society as to deny that these would be wrong. Having demonstrated that there is a line, the question becomes where it should be drawn, and this question cannot be answered by science alone. Science is not inherently ethical; it must be politically regulated, particularly where it infringes on human dignity.
There's more to be said. I'll bet some of you can say it yourself, in the comments.
