Bioethics and the Embryo

Part IV: Concepts clarification - the first

[This series of essays are sequential portions of a larger work completed in 2021 which was broadly separable as purely scientific, and as science and the spiritual combined. The entire corpus has a general introduction, 4 Sections, a general conclusion and a bibliography. The General Introduction and the two scientific Sections of the work (about our origination, our earliest days and on embryonic engineering) were published as three Parts in the archive “Dr Eshan is Curious”. And, here are the links to those: one, two, https://dreshandias.substack.com/p/embryonic-engineering.

For the sake of continuity, the article here below is subtitled Part IV, and it is the first of the bioethical portions which cannot remain purely materialistic but needs to make provision for moral and spiritual considerations.

Here, at Max and Tracy’s, we will in sequence publish the portions that require acceptance of something that transcends the physical, material, bodily aspects of creation, in treating of our humanity, from the first instance of our existence. This Part IV and Part V that will follow (which constitute Section 3 of the work) will address the concepts and ideas employed so that some clarity is achieved with which to address the arguments that will be engaged with in subsequent Parts (being Section 4)].

Section III – Concepti

“Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin -- a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or no man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing. But certain religious leaders in London, not mere materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt.”

Gilbert Keith Chesterton in Orthodoxy

Ideas and Realities

The concepts utilised to formulate objections will be addressed entirely conceptually at the outset and their knots disentangled, so that the pseudo-scientific and apparently valid scientific objections relevant to human beings particularly during our period of embryogeny, become more easily grasped for what they converge to be and do not slip through due to a multitude of words with varied meanings which may all have a shared purpose.  The theories of many philosophers, theologians, bioethicists, legislators and scientists even though articulated variously and regurgitated frequently, often share in principle if not always in degree a common ideology – which has been flogged throughout the decades that followed their formulation and continues to be with acquisition of enthusiastic contemporary followers, even though the horse is dead.

Soul

A word is often interpreted differently whether between people or across time, and this difference could be in breadth or in specificity of meaning.  Likewise, several words may be used to describe any one of these interpretations or combination of interpretations.  “Soul” is thought to be of proto-Germanic origin and may have a connection to the sea with its mysterious and misty eternity which in ancient northern Europe may have been believed to be the source and destiny of the essence of men.  “Soul” often encompasses that which is spiritual or immaterial, and also that which actuates or animates a living organism, usually a human being.  It is often interchangeable with intellect, mind, and psyche - Jungian or otherwise, which originates in the Greek psykhe.  It may be attributed powers of sensing, feeling, thinking, reasoning and willing and be thought of as the source of emotions, and may show progress or decline and be classified into stages as with the ruh in Sufism. 

In Hinduism, the souls or Purushas each indistinguishable from the other, but distinct from a perhaps Fredian ego - ahamkara, and from the mind – citta, are believed by some schools to be of the body of Vishnu the preserver god and upholder of creation, or of the Supreme-Self or -Consciousness Paramathma who may be the Brahmana or the ultimate creative unchanging cosmic principle.  Purushas sometimes synonymous with atmas are engaged or ensnared by nature or Prakriti to join with bodies to become Jivas or embodied souls which then are released or escape back to the free and untainted state of pure consciousness consequent to which the cycle repeats through these twin processes called degenerative involution and regenerative evolution, thus ensuring the continuity of creation.   The Buddhist proposition of anatta suggests that an eternal soul is incongruent with the doctrine of impermanence - anicca, but there is belief in re-incarnation with its associated sorrow - dukkha, from which one must strive to escape into the nothingness of nirvana.

The word “spirit” derived from the Latin spiritus suggests the wind, blowing, breathing and thereby living and life.  It is sometimes synonymous with soul and has been applied in translating the Greek pnuema and the Hebew ruah.  Where animation is concerned, we could infer that animals, plants, all living organisms and forms of life have a soul, sometimes called a vegetative soul or where applicable a sensitive soul.   The existence of a rational soul is proposed to explain reasoning, abstract thinking, speech or even developmental autonomy, and we may possess it and thus a rational nature even at times or situations where we do not have the capability to exercise reason.  It is vital to distinguish between all understandings of soul with the spiritual human God-gifted eternal soul that only human beings have, and because of which we are human beings.

The Catechism promulgated by Pope John Paul II holds that the “soul signifies the spiritual principle in man” “by which he is most especially in God’s image”, and makes clear with reference to the Council of Vienne that “the unity of the soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the ‘form’ of the body” and that it this soul that defines the human being; and further, that “spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature”.  Evangelium Vitae referring also to Familiaris Consortio, taught that the human person is a "unified totality", that is, "a soul which expresses itself in a body and a body informed by an immortal spirit”.  It is this immortal, God-gifted, human-specific soul which creates us as an image of God, that makes a man a man, that is of essence in discussions regarding ensoulment of embryos.  This is the immortal spirit or spiritual soul, that part of us which is from God and willed by God, which makes us human beings, and that which is created for no merit of our own to adore God for eternity in our resurrected body, in an eternal rapture of communion by the grace of His Love. 

The concept of ensoulment or delayed ensoulment is considered to take place at a point, loosely and variously defined, when the body is deemed sufficiently qualified for it.  This proposition is untenable since what matters is to know if there is a human being, and if there is, then he cannot not have his soul.  When the human being begins his existence, then also does his soul begin to exist, since the two are one.  One may logically extend the ensoulment reasoning to propose desoulment towards the end of life, in disease or other states where the criteria of reasoning, psychological competence, physical abilities, sentience or consciousness become diminished or absent and declare such persons’ end-of-worth - and justify manipulation or destruction of these vulnerable human beings.

Waste                            

It is contended that since there is a high proportion of embryos who die without undergoing successful implantation, embryos of that age are not human because God would not allow so many human beings to die without a fulfilled life being lived, and that therefore these embryos cannot be human at that age.  Of course, this does not count later embryonic loss or stillbirths or other prenatal deaths.  Neither does is count neonatal deaths or young men lost in wars or motor vehicle accidents, nor any others who do not live up to their potential.  The last century saw millions destroyed due to the ideological campaigns of Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao and Stalin and the slaughter of a greater order of magnitude continues into today in the form of elective abortions, abortifacient drugs and devices and human embryonic engineering and medical research, driven by the ideologies of radical feminism, post-modernism and politically-correct Marxism. 

Today we are blessed with advances in healthcare and medical knowledge, and infant mortality is far less than a century ago.  Historical studies suggests that until very recent times one-quarter of infants died in their first year of life and half of all children died before they reached the end of puberty.  The humanity of these deceased children was never questioned even though some may have contended that their lives had been wasted.  However, the logic of Karl Rahner SJ and Egbert Schroten would extend to asking the question as to whether the 5-year-old child of history was hominised or ensouled, to propose infantic engineering or their destruction for therapeutic or academic purposes – and likewise for anyone else they believe did not live a life meaningful by their standards, including wasted soldiers, wasted birthing mothers – noting that in the nineteenth century 500 to 1000 mothers died for every 100,000 births, and wasted martyrs and the enormous numbers of those lost to the plague, tuberculosis and smallpox throughout history. For infantrymen moral theologians following their own logic should propose ensoulment once the war is over, since “God acts mediately”. 

St Therese Martin said she had no merit of her own to deserve heaven and St Theresa de Cepeda y Ahumada believed herself to be a great sinner, and both would have wished to have loved their Lord even more during the lives they had on Earth.  Then, who is to say what a life is worth, and what is waste, and if it mattered?  The “wasted” embryo deserves salvation no more than the greatest saint.  The comatose, the psychotic and the aborted deserve it no less than the crusader or confessor because they have all been redeemed by the Blood of the Lamb.  The deceased infant did not earn it more than the angels.  That some of us have the privilege of a greater training in love, and the opportunity to make a more determined choice to be saved or to carry a cross more devotedly is a grace granted, to be humbly grateful for.  Why one man is rich and the other poor, why one man dies earlier and the other later, why one is pink and the other brown, why one is created female and the other male, or why in general each of us have been differently blessed may be a point to ponder as long as one knows that we are equally loved by God, and equally in need of salvation.  The problem of why some are “wasted” in the embryonic stage of life and why some live a century need to be seen from this perspective - but belonging to a category that gets wasted does not imply that the survivors within that category are not persons and thus fit for abuse. 

Damnation

The proponents of the wastage doctrine also contend that the wasted embryos are allowed by God to perish, if we accept that the embryos were human beings and they died.  Following the logic of the moral theologians of half a century ago and their adherents today, the concerns regarding the salvation of so-called wasted embryos should be extended to surgically aborted children who are allowed to die in the hands of physicians by the will of parents.  Likewise, it should be argued that all who lived prior to the institution of Baptism were not ensouled and that the pagans of today are unhominised since it can’t be figured out why God permits their deaths, because deaths in these segments of humanity leads to massive perdition.  Since a large proportion of humanity today are pagan, we may then infer by Rahnian logic that the baptised are not ensouled either.  We would be wiser to meditate on the parable of the vineyard in Matthew 20.

Anima

Animation was historically linked with quickening or when the mother first felt the prenatal movements of her child.  Dissenting theologian Joseph Donceel SJ posited that animation required the possession of a spiritual soul, which he also qualified abstractly as a “human” and “intellectual” soul, as distinct from “vegetative” and “animal” souls.  This enabled the conceptualisation of delayed animation to suggest infusion of such a spiritual soul at some point after conception, the delay being the time between the beginning of the life of the embryo up to the point he was permitted to be declared alive.  However, since animation is connected to the status of being alive and even the science of his day could well demonstrate that we were alive from the time that we started to live, Fr Donceel proposed the use of the term “hominisation” and the necessary “delayed hominisation” to mean the possession or acquisition of the requisite human soul, and today bioethicist proponents of human embryonic manipulation use both animation and hominisation interchangeably.

Homo

Hominisation is a term borrowed from zoological anthropological sciences which means becoming human, and abused to mean the attainment of personhood or ensoulment.  By reasoning similar to what might be used to show that the term animation fails in dehumanising the embryo since it is alive, the term hominisation fails also since the embryo is a man or human being, and a human being after designated delays does not and cannot become a human being when and because he already is one. 

Individual

Taking an idea spawned by fish biologist Clifford Grobstein of a graded development in human beings corresponding to gradual attainment of personhood, moral theologian Richard McCormick SJ proposed the notion of a “developmental individual” that an embryo would need to be in order to be considered a person and thereby protected from threats to his life.  Bioethicists and even scientists purport that we become “individuated” when we can no longer generate another from ourselves and therefore happen to be the source of only ourselves, allegedly thereby gaining dignity in not having had a twin by the time we reach a designated age or degree of development.  The attainment of the inability for another to be generated from ourselves, that constitutes the mind-boggling “individuation” concept is the untenable proposition that ipso facto we come to a point in our ontogenical continuum after which it is believed that we cannot twin, we become human beings worthy of getting on with our lives unhindered - with perhaps personhood and ensoulment gained into the bargain, this being a value we did not possess a moment before. 

The concept of “individuation” might be attractive today among those immersed in cultures that propagate narcissism and teach a self-centred self-esteem to their children.  Even if such an abstract “individuated” individuality, which is dissonant with the understanding of an individual as merely being distinct and a description of a present state than a past achievement, could be justified as conceptually important to its proponents even if not to the embryos, there is no justification for dehumanising individuals who have not achieved such a status of “individuation”.

In an era where children are considered a burden and a cost calculated in terms of day-care and education, and where international organisations unite in Roman clubs to remind us that we are a cancer on the planet based on theories comparable in defensibility as that of individuation, the perspective of earlier generations - that considered olive shoots around the table a blessing and would have thought that generating of another from themselves was a matter of great joy while tragedy would be the inability to do so, seem to have passed.  Today the shoots are suppressed by weedicides ingested liberally in pursuance of equity.

Conversely, those who have been separated or duplicated - who failed to reach a designated individuation time or developmental point without dividing, could perhaps be called “developmental generics” as opposed to “developmental individuals”, and may by extension of this concept have lower moral status for not having remained individual throughout, or for having been generated at all.

[In the next part, we will continue to clarify the concepts employed, so that the work may be concluded with a discussion employing these concepts]