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Embryos: people like you and me

My friends Edd and Simon have made some good points in criticism of my earlier post citing Christian feminist Frederica Matthewes-Green which made me realise I owe a more careful explanation of why I think that embryos should be treated as human beings to whom our general belief that we should not arbitrarily end human life applies. That was the presupposition of the post, which I shall try and defend here.

Conception is the beginning of something. Before conception, sperm and eggs do not become anything else. They just are what they are. So their meeting at conception changes them, and begins something. The only really relevant question is, what begins? Is it the beginning of human life as we commonly recognise it in one another (in which case its arbitrary ending could not be justified), or only the beginning of something which will subsequently become human life? (Even if it were the latter, it would still not be at all clear that it would be acceptable to destroy something that if left undisturbed would become human life.)

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.)

IVF and the commercialisation and of children

Sorry not to update for a while. Two recent news items, although they did not directly pass comment on the issues they were reporting on, prompted me to reflect on the way we see children in our culture today and the worrying implications of this view.

The first report was on the undercover investigation by the BBC program Panorama into two London IVF clinics run by Dr Mohamed Taranissi (summary report here). Clearly there have been abuses in at least one of his clinics, although that does not in itself impugn IVF. Rather, what intrigued me about the report were the easy assumptions made about IVF and its purposes and most importantly the view of children and parenthood which lay behind it.

1. The medicalisation of infertility. Infertility is characterised as an illness, to which IVF is the appropriate treatment. The terminology is so common that in one sense it will hardly give us pause. But is there more to it than that? The adoption of the illness-treatment model tends to obscure the fact that IVF is significantly different to, say, prescribing antibiotics to get rid of an infection. It's also different from, say, surgery to correct a damaged fallopian tube (which might have the same ultimate consequence). What is being treated is, as it were, the unmet desire for children. Furthermore, this language will tend to normalise and justify uncritically whatever methods are necessary to procure the desired result, since if it is seen as a treatment, then it is taken as read that it is necessary and right.
2. The functionalisation of children. It is relatively commonplace, but nonetheless valid for that, to point out that IVF here seems to make parenthood a quasi-right, and children as therefore created in order to satisfy their parents desires. Obviously, desire to have children is not wrong. But it is correct to raise the question of whether children should be specifically made in order to satisfy such desires. As Dr Taranissi puts it, he wants to "provide results for people".
3. The commercialisation of children. IVF is big business. Dr Taranissi has amassed a fortune of £38 million. Wow! People are prepared to pay a lot to get children! But one wonders whether this is a relationship that ought to be commercialised. There are a lot of things, as we say, that money can't buy. One can buy bread and apples and cars and shampoo. But we don't think we should bribe a judge in order to 'buy' justice, for example. We also agree that one shouldn't be allowed to buy people, because one should not be allowed to treat people as chattels. Some things we can buy and some things we can't. And it seems pretty clear that children fall more into the latter category than the former: they are more like justice and people than apples and shampoo - they are humans, not commodities.

The second report (much more briefly) was concerned with the potential implications of the new Sexual Orientation Regulations on Catholic adoption agencies. (See here for e.g.) What interested me about these is that the regulations prohibit discrimination against people on the basis of their sexual orientation for failing to provide "goods, facilities or services" (text here). Surely by any stretch of interpretation the adoption of a child cannot be considered a good, facility or service? Or has the commercialisation of children gone even further than we might have thought?

Whilst I'm on the subject, I might as well mention that I don't really see what all the church hoo-ha is about the SORs. It doesn't seem that they will affect most of the situations sometimes rather shrilly mentioned (see these parliamentary answers), and even if it does I wonder if it's much better to wait until we get sued rather than threatening to close down our charitable provisions such as adoption agencies. It looks like cheap emotional blackmail. The political posture of the church ought to be that of martyr, not blackmailer!

Genetics is big business

This article is essential reading. Do skip the first few paragraphs of slightly irritating point-scoring about Synods and creationism, but read the summary of the science, from: "What of the science of genetics and its implications?"

For those without time, here are his main conclusions:

1. ‘Genome Farming’
Teams of genome hunters from major commercial companies are very active in many poor countries hunting the gene sequences of indigenous peoples for patent protection as outlined above. International law gives only limited rights to these peoples for the privacy of their genome sequences or for income derived from them. This is exploitation of a quite unwarrantable kind.

2. Insurance Investments
The discussions on Human Genome Privacy between the Association of British Insurers (ABI) and the Government are ongoing. It is clear that between 10 per cent – 15 per cent of our population are genetically disadvantaged with regard to incipient and early disease. Currently life assurance premiums especially involving mortgage lending etc, are based upon actuarial tables to calculate risks.

It seems clear that any publicly available genetic data could create an underclass as far as lifestyles are concerned, especially if the genome sequences could be seen as ‘sequences in utero’. This underclass would effectively be established to the benefit of finance houses and such a scenario has been under discussion between the Government and the ABI. Embryos as young as six weeks gestation will shed foetal cells into a mother’s circulation and such cells can now be harvested and genomically sequenced. This has significant implications for those promoting a eugenically pure society. The use of these techniques and their potential has been discussed by a series of House of Commons Select Committees resulting in some alarming recommendations.

Until recently, Colin was Deputy Chief Scientist, responsible for genetics, at the Department of Health and a Senior Consultant to the World Health Organisation. (Biog. info from CVM.)