Imagination and embryos

Frederica Matthewes-Green, "Stem Cells and Starry Nights" in Again Magazine November 2001:

Now you must think of something very small: in a cold, dark place there are miniature children suspended in frost, snow babies, unmoving and unbreathing. They are everywhere, in ice orphanages across the country, and there are many of them, a couple of hundred thousand, myriad as the stars in the sky. But there is something smaller still. It is the individual cells that these sleeping bodies contain. Left intact and implanted in a womb, they would grow into a little boy or girl. Tweezered out by scientists they will grow, but only into tissue, like the stuffing inside a doll. Such a thing seems nightmarish, Frankensteinish, and the impulse is to say once again that our ability to do such things has outdistanced our ability to weigh whether we should. But there is unexplored hope here, the experts plead. Look at these people, young men in wheelchairs, old men shaking, children weak in their mother's arms. A few of these cells might grow and restore what has been lost. It might restore full health.

The cost? Nothing, really. Most of these sleeping snow babies are doomed never to wake. Their parents intentionally created far more embryos than they could use. Occasionally a couple asks to adopt an abandoned embryo by implantation, but far less than enough to rescue them all. Many of them would die in the rough process of implantation anyway. Yet if the parts were disassembled and tended they might improve another's life. To what can we liken such a plea? Is it like taking the corneas of an accident victim and using them to give a blind person sight? Or is it like harvesting skin from a Jewish corpse and using it to make a lampshade?

We try again to picture the tiny embryos and to feel sympathy for their condition. It doesn't come naturally. They don't look like babies. They look like blobs–what you can see, anyway, which is little larger than a pinpoint. They aren't warm and cuddly, but still and cold. This suspended existence looks like nothing in human experience–like nothing worth preserving. Why not just let them go, so they can be useful?

Herein lies the lie. Useful. Imagine a human being whose sole purpose is to be food for another human being. Did God ever create such a thing? Every human life is precious, unique, in ways only God knows–he has formed our hidden parts in secret, with care. Every one of us is an end, not a means. No one was made to be a lampshade. No one was made to supply body parts for another person that he still has need of for himself.

(I found this quote in Edith Humphrey's article on embryonic stem cell research, accessible here.)

Comments

[Simon]

She is close to losing any point she might make through appeal to the Nazi's and the necessary application of Godwin's law.

More seriously, the author confuses a blob of cells with a human being; she does not engender sympathy for a blob of cells rather she engenders sympathy for a human being and then switches the sympathy to a blob of cells.

The argument seems rather shaky on many grounds. We know that when attempting to conceive the human body will fail to implant some embryos, is God therefore secretly rejecting the ends of some people? Or are such failed implantations merely a consequence of the fall? To suggest that this is the case would appear to be stretching the theology to breaking point.

The use of the word sympathy (by root very similar to compassion) indicates an emotional suffering with the other and is totally misplaced. To the best of my knowledge, such embryos are not capable of suffering as we understand suffering as they do not have a developed nervous system (though we might observe cellular reaction to stimulus). Therefore the words sympathy and compassion should not be used, as they lead the reader astray in thoughts of emotional suffering and fear, putting themselves with a fully developed CNS into the place of a cluster of cells.

You correctly use the word imagination, because that is what the author requires. The author is generating a fear and distress in the reader that does not exist in the other, it is imaginary. Sympathy for an embryo does not come naturally because it is impossible. The author is merely muddying the waters with emotion and fear that is not necessary.

[Sean Doherty]

Not sure that's quite what Godwin's law is about (doesn't it only apply to internet forums?), still less that it's valid in the first place!

Certainly she assumes rather than argues the case that an embryo is a human being. In any case, I think it unwarranted to suppose one cannot feel sympathy for such, e.g. sadness at the loss of prospect of a full life that could have been lived.

But the key point in her image is the notion of the human being as an object to be used. This overcomes the objection re. fetal wastage, which moves from what is to what should be without, as you correctly identified, taking account of the fall, because there is a difference between tragedy (bad stuff happens) to crime (someone does bad stuff to someone else).

[Simon Bradford]

The Godwin's law stuff was tongue in cheek, hence the "More seriously". Though I do think that use of such extremes does tend to undermine an argument.
I would contend that " e.g. sadness at the loss of prospect of a full life that could have been lived." is not sympathy or compassion, instead it is a personal sadness based on a particular world view; as opposed to a "suffering with" the Other, which is sympathy or compassion. Sadness and sympathy are very different, even in semantic terms.
I don't like throwing away toys with a sentimental value, in my mind I imagine that my old teddy feels aggrieved at being put in the bin because he is no longer useful. This is not sympathy, I don't know what to call it, but it is not sympathy or compassion, because I the other is not suffering.
I felt that her argument could easily have been distilled to simply highlight the risks involved in viewing embryos as resources, without the images and Nazi allusions it would have been far more powerful.
What I am unclear about is whether by her standards, should we try and find a womb for every frozen embryo? Or is it just the scary tweezering out bit she objects to? I guess she also objects to fertility treatments where embryos are not used and disposed of as unneeded resources?

[Edd]

I have to say I find these views on what is and isn't a human faintly disturbing. I don't know whether the idea that embryos are human beings is too broad or too narrow, but at the end of the day I think it is essentially too simplistic. An embryo isn't to me a person to which I think human rights should be granted, but a talking dog who I could hold a meaningful conversation with would be, even though it's obviously not human.

It is, for me, verging on sinister that someone could conceivably ascribe human rights to a ball of undifferentiated cells, and equivalently refuse them to someone alive, sentient but unfortunate enough not to be human. It looks to me like the same reasoning that's leading to people trying to prevent atrocities I don't think are happening could lead to them being blind to atrocities I think are (even if such situations are currently firmly in the realm of the hypothetical).

[Sean Doherty]

Thanks Edd. I think I need to post a proper defense of why I think embryos are very small, unconscious human beings rather than clusters of cells but it basically boils down to the fact that you and I are ALSO clusters of cells and that I find no relevant differentiation between you and me and them. The proposed differentiations e.g. consciousness, rationality etc I find very unsatisfactory because there are humans who do lack consciousness, rationality and so on but whose lives should not be arbitrarily ended e.g. patients in a coma, the senile. Where do you draw the line, if not biological life? And why privilege those features of human life instead of biological ones? It seems rather arbitrary.

When we find beings who are alive, sentient and so on e.g. talking dogs or rational aliens then I will certainly agree with you that they should be subject to the same legal protection from arbitrary killing that you and I are. In the meantime, I am more concerned about atrocities which I really do believe are happening!

[Edd]

There's certainly difficult questions there. I guess what you believe is that there is something very fundamental - namely a soul - which makes a person a person. Really, it doesn't matter what the body is as long as there's one attached to it? So we're actually in some sense agreed there that the physical form doesn't really matter, but you'd operate by a different set of rules to me in determining if something's worthy (not quite the right word somehow, but you know what I mean) of the protections and rights we afford to humans.

I sympathise entirely with your issues with the differentiations I might use. I guess what I would do is not have a clear cut yes/no definition of 'human'. Not only do people develop from things that aren't full humans to full humans gradually, but I don't think I could even give one definition of a human, nor define a unique set of rights I think should be granted - rather that some are given earlier than others (for example, a right to vote coming much later on the list than the right to life). It's a horribly complex issue, filled with slippery slopes, but unfortunately an unavoidable one, at least from my point of view.

It hurts my brain to think too long about this as well, so I can only hope that clever and eloquent philosophers can resolve this problem for me.

[Sean Doherty]

Thanks for continuing to engage Edd. I don't really believe in the soul as some kind of extra bit (that's a concept from Greek philosophy more than the Bible). In fact, it's my disbelief in such a thing that makes me identify the beginning and end of biological life as the beginning and end of life per se. Whereas once you introduce the soul as an 'extra', there is no particular need to assume that soul and body are always united. This is the position of the former Bishop of Oxford, who believes that the soul didn't get added on til later so you could do what you liked with embryos.

I sympathise with your point about not having a clear-cut definition. In which case, if you can't know for sure, surely the most logical thing would be to stick to the safe side! As one ethicist put it, to be willing to kill what for all one knows *might* be a person, is to be willing to kill a person. (Personally I think we can go further than that since conception just seems such a clear demarcation point at which a new biological and therefore human life begins.)

I am uneasy about language of rights - no need to bring it in. The prohibition on murder does the same job without the huge question of "so when do we confer what rights". No need to see it in terms of rights - we all agree that murder is wrong.

I am no eloquent philosopher, and still less do I expect to have solved the problem, but how does that strike you?!

[Edd]

Excellent first point, and thanks for explaining that!

While I generally agree with sticking to the safe side (I probably fall somewhat further from the usual crowd of people with similar points of view to me in preferring a relatively strict 'sorry, too late' position on this matter), I think that placing this point at conception is quite a bit further to the safe side than is really necessary. There's a grey area at some point in the process between conception and birth, but I personally feel comfortable with it in the first few weeks.

Agree to some extent on the 'language of rights'. But I'd still maintain that it's hard to claim something is either human or not, and that there is a middle ground that unfortunately falls in (but doesn't cover fully) the time frame when women can feel the need for an abortion.

[A Badger]

"The prohibition on murder does the same job without the huge question of "so when do we confer what rights". No need to see it in terms of rights - we all agree that murder is wrong"

I'm not sure this works in your argument, we define murder very specifically, and there are very few people (I count myself as one) who consider killing to be wrong at all times. Manslaughter? Self-defense? At times of war? My point is that many people add levels of grey even when there is no argument about whether they are currently "human" or not.