Concepts in Embryological Bioethics
Part V: Persons, Potential and Jesuits
[Concepts such as soul and individual were, inter alia, addressed in Part 4. Part 5 below concludes the discussion on concepts, and prepares us to engage with the arguments of misguided bioethicists]
Singleness
Distinctiveness, singleness and uniqueness are among words used in close association with individuatedness, all these concepts suggesting that we would be less than human, or even less human if such abstraction can be grasped, if we were diminished in any of these attributes, as in the case of arguably individuation-failed generics, such as twins.
Potential
The potentiality concept used in a finalistic or teleological sense can be useful in providing grounds to believe that the embryo who from a unicellular beginning proceeds to become an adult is indeed the same human being and therefore if this same adult is a person, then he was one earlier on as well. The concept is abused when someone who is deemed to possess active potential is deprived of personhood on account of not yet having achieved this potential. The idea of potential is also abused when attributed interchangeably between subjects possessing intrinsically different natures. While a sperm has the potential to fertilise an oocyte, and the oocyte has the potential to be fertilised, it is specious to state that the gametes have potential to produce an embryo in order to suggest that the ontologically and teleologically distinct embryo did not originate in the process by which the gametes cease to be but is a mere progression in the ontogeny of the oocyte.
Distinction needs also to be made that the embryo has the potential functionally, structurally or developmentally to become a foetus based on the definition of these prenatal terms, the toddler has the potential to become a youth and the zygote has the potential to become a blastula, but at no stage after we are generated do we have the potential to become a human being because we are a human being and have been from our beginning and throughout these developments. There is difference between these ontogenical potentials and the progressive gaining of mental, psychological, intellectual and sentient capabilities, and the fundamentally different phenomenon of the origination of a new human being who begins to live his new life. It is impossible for me to have the potential to become a human being, even though I have potential to undergo biological developmental processes and to gain in various aptitudes.
Functionally or in terms of associated processes or competencies, an embryo may have the potential to become implanted, the foetus that to be born, and the infant to breathe, and even the young woman to become a mother. The gastrula has the potential to become a neurula, the neural plate has the potential to become a brain, and the student has the potential to learn mathematics and he may develop the potential to do Fourier transforms in his head, conceptualise superstrings, see romance in a painting hung up in a gallery or give up his life to defend what he believes is true, but achievement of these do not confer personhood or hominity on him – nor does failure deprive him of his soul.
Person
The word originated in circa 1200 from Latin via old French and meant an individual or a human being, having derived from the sense of a character in a drama who assumes a persona by wearing a mask, and may have deeper roots in the Etruscan phersu meaning mask. Personhood matters because in many legal systems, only persons have rights. In the US constitution, the right to life is granted to persons, the authors never imagining that their descendants would institutionalise violent physician-assisted deprivations of motherhood, glorify Wirthsian experimentation in test tubes, and classify their pre-born children as non-persons - even though one could devalue and tyrannise any segment of society using other terms such as “untouchable” or “foreigner” or base this segmentation on race, skin colour, religion, degree of ability in certain competencies and not only on one’s age or size or degree of physical and intellectual development.
Declining membership into the community of those legally defined as persons, enable abuse and exploitation of the de facto non-persons. That personhood has been used in order to isolate a category of human beings who were to be deprived of rights is evident throughout history. So-called “blacks” or African-origin Americans were enslaved, murdered and raped, and Julia Greeley had no rights when her mother was whipped by their owner and her own eye was damaged. The Red Indians of northern America were robbed, forced onto reserves, and killed. The Jews and gypsies of the Third Reich were excluded from “legal personhood” and millions were tortured and killed. Women could not receive education, inherit or own property, vote for political representatives or in some cases have custody of their children. In Canada they did not have the right to be elected to the senate since they were not persons until 1924.
Prisoners were used for medical experiments, and the Dalits of India, the lepers of Palestine and the natives of South Africa suffered similarly at the hands of the senators and intellectuals of their day even though “personhood” was not always the trending word. Today multi-millions of developing human beings in the womb or in petri dishes are poisoned, dismembered, mutilated, frozen and discarded by nations that - while sometimes conceding their humanity, deny them “legal personhood.” It matters when the powerful within the community make the rules to the perceived communal advantage, disregarding fundamental and objective facts, and take from the powerless what is their due – which they are too weak to claim.
Philosophers have often required in various combinations and each to various degrees - conceding that each attribute is not mutually exclusive of another, consciousness, self-awareness, reflective self-evaluation, feeling and sentience, and even at least neurulation if not possession of a mature brain capable of rationality that may encompass recollection, intellect, thinking, reasoning, understanding, volition, deliberation, free will, reasoning, reflective self-evaluation and desire, emotion, language and being alive, for the subject under discussion to qualify as a person.
Legislatures today attribute personhood to corporations, states and institutions in consideration of their rights and duties under law, to animals such as apes, elephants and dolphins because of their intelligence, even computational devices based on their electronic consciousness – such as the humanoid robot Sophia who received Saudi Arabian citizenship, and rivers because they are believed to live and possess a soul. Philosophers have proposed that apes have more rights than the senile or sick human being who should be chosen in preference for experimentation. It is interesting also that the horse foetus is protected more than human ones in certain countries and more than those who need to be fed via a tube in others, and now lab mice are beginning to acquire their rights.
Where rationality is concerned, Alex the African grey parrot had more than a year-old infant and one may concede the variation in degree of rationality. There also exists related degrees of personhood as in the case of minors versus adults, or in the accumulation of rights by women over the decades. Personhood may also depend on context where a minor may have rights for some things but be protected from liability in others. Likewise, slavery under a given government or empire may be illegal in the home nation but legal in the colonies creating a location-based personhood for the traveler. Post-humous personhood is discussed in association with inter alia attempts to build interactive online avatars of social media presence of diseased subscribers, while disease or disability in men who are alive may lose it. Personhood is also granted for a foetus prematurely born but not for his corresponding counterpart who will enjoy amniotic bliss for longer.
The concept of personhood and the attributes a person by some definition possesses may enable an entity to become a person, but that is determined by the definition itself and the opinions of the definers, whereas the human being at whatever age, stage of life or development, or in possession of whatever capabilities or lack of them, can never become what he already is, irrespective of whether he becomes a person according the definition of personhood under consideration. Considering that personhood is awarded to trees and computers and may exist in varying degrees, it is questionable whether it is relevant in determining the right to life of a human being if the word was not already encoded in existing laws. This concept is a tool in the hands of philosophers, legislators, bioethicists and moral theologians with which to rationalise, legislate and bring respectability to tyranny, but it cannot make a human being any less a human being, nor can it make the Whanganui river or the Ganges a man.
Pre-embryo
The term “pre-embryo” was created by zoologist Clifford Grobstein in 1979 demonstrating great sleight-of-thought in suggesting that the pre-implantation embryo was in a “cellular” or “pre-embryonic” phase and that the embryo phase therefore begins after implantation. He asserted that the pre-embryo would thereby be a “pre-person”. Even though this creative terminology based on contrived scientific phantasm did not gather momentum at the time, it ascended to fame beginning in the UK where there was a threat of legislation protective of unborn children further to the birth of Louise Brown and it was necessary to transform the semantic landscape to enable legal in vitro creation and manipulation of human embryos. Spurred by Ann McLaren’s 1986 letter to Nature proposing this farcical word among others, which was published on April 1st, its popularity ensued. A major proponent of this disingenuous semantic, among others, was US priest Richard McCormick who published the lead article in the initial issue of the journal of the Kennedy Institute for Bioethics propagating the lie of the pre-embryo, the requirement of individuation, and the ensoulment and personhood that comes with it. He had become a professor at this novel institute, having been a key member of a group of Catholic moral theologians who substantially contributed towards what culminated in Roe v Wade and Doe v Bolton, and he later dissented against Humane Vitae.
Scientists who specialise in the study of embryos are embryologists and they, whether atheists or believers, whether they value the life of a human being or whether they believe human beings are guinea pigs for their experiments, whether motivated towards reproduction, therapeutics or by mere creator narcissism, or whether desiring to serve humanity or themselves, are nearly unanimous in rejecting the term “pre-embryo” which was designed for use specifically and exclusively in human embryology in order to assuage moral concerns originally regarding embryo abuse in IVF procedures and in early abortions and thereby drive inhuman legislation. It is used to dehumanise the human being in the earliest stages of development, so that it may become justifiable to manipulate them in a way that would be considered unworthy of a human being.
The prefix “pre” indicates before and so the term pre-embryo indicates something that exists before the embryo, and if before, then it is not yet embryo and if it is not yet embryo then it is not embryo or is un-embryo. One may induce then that the pre-embryo is a pre-person or non-person eligible for exploitation. One is expected to reason out that the embryo may have some rights - even though elective abortion laws have destroyed that, but if the embryo is at an earlier stage of pre-embryo, then such rights would not apply. An analogy can be drawn by considering whether we would call a boy in primary school a pre-boy and say he will develop into a boy proper when he enters secondary school, having perhaps developed a growth on his lip that makes him look more like a man.
Even if we did not call out this Fallopian semantic and accepted that we will be referred to as the pre-embryo we would still die if we were killed during this period, as we would after we were firmly attached to our mother’s endometrium or after we emerged from the sanctuary of her womb and started breathing air, or for that matter if death occurred later in life.
Synopsis
If human beings ipso facto do have souls, then as far as theologians may be concerned personhood of the human being in human law systems needs to be reconciled with the human being, rather than the human being becoming subject to the legal definition. As long as a human being is a person, he is a person when young or old, healthy or sick, a ball of cells or a bundle of joy. If prevailing legal definitions of person are employed, he may or may not be included in the definition, but legal definitions are irrelevant as far as his worth is concerned. If human beings are body-soul unities, the question of whether or when or if “ensoulment” occurs is irrelevant, and Fr Donceel’s assertion that what grows in the mother’s womb is a virtual or potential body would imply that IVF practitioners place something virtual into the hostess’ wombs after having produced something virtual in the test tube.
If a human being ipso facto has dignity and a destiny and the right to live and not to be killed, then that human being is a man and is living, is perhaps a person, with perhaps a soul. If any of these factors are made pre-requisites and then be shown to be lacking, then in compliance with ethics thus derived, accepted and enshrined, the human being loses his dignity and right to life and may be abused and destroyed legally in good conscience at any point in his life.
To address the ethical considerations, it is of essence and yet sufficient to understand whether there is a human being present, come into being naturally in marital love or lack of it, micro-engineered robotically under a microscope and cloned via nuclear transfer or fabricated via cellular aggregation. If a human being ipso facto deserves respect, then age, size or degree of development, capabilities or aptitudes, possession of philosophical attributes, circumstances of origination or even his virtue or sinfulness is irrelevant. Likewise, if some entity does not deserve respect, then being born, big, fulfilled, self-conscious and able to choose to fight for his rights to wifi, would not make him any more or less human or dignified.
The advancement in scientific knowledge and the growth of technological capability does not outpace morality – rather the articulation of morals needs to become sufficiently refined to address novelties. Donum vitae referred to fertilisation as the beginning of the life of a human being in the context of the evils of IVF, abortifacient birth control products and outright abortion, but its authors had the hindsight to generalise its principles as concerning the “fruit of human generation”.