Embryos, Dignity, and Resort to Authority Part II

This is Part II of a three part post (Part I is here) using Professor George’s “Embryo Ethics,” an essay forthcoming in Daedulas, to explore whether embryos share equal moral worth with other human organisms (beings).

George frames the issue:  “At the heart of the debate over embryo-destructive research, then, are two fundamentals questions: what – or who – is a human embryo, and what is owed to a human embryo as a matter of justice.”

This post will address the first part of the question:  scientifically, what – or who – is a human embryo.  The third post will address the philosophical question.

George writes:

“The adult human being that is now you or me is the same human being who, at an earlier stage of his or her life, was an adolescent, and before that a child, an infant, a fetus, and an embryo.  Even in the embryonic stage, you and I were undeniably whole, living members of the species Homo sapiens.  We were then, as we are now, distinct and complete—though in the beginning we were, of course, developmentally immature—human organisms; we were not mere parts of other organisms.

“A human embryo is not something different in kind from a human being, like a rock, or a potato, or a rhinoceros.  A human embryo is a human individual in the earliest stage of his or her natural development.  Unless severely damaged or denied or deprived of a suitable environment, an embryonic human being will, by directing his or her own integral organic functioning, develop himself or herself to each more mature developmental stage along the gapless continuum of a human life.  The embryonic, fetal, infant, child, and adolescent stages are just that—stages in the development of a determinate and enduring entity—a human being—who comes into existence as a single cell organism (zygote) and develops, if all goes well, into adulthood many years later.

“By contrast, the gametes whose union brings into existence the embryo are not whole or distinct organisms.  They are functionally (and genetically) identifiable as parts of the male or female (potential) parents.  Each has only half the genetic material needed to guide the development of an immature human being toward full maturity.  They are destined either to combine with an oocyte or spermatozoon to generate a new and distinct organism, or simply die.  Even when fertilization occurs, they do not survive; rather, their genetic material enters into the composition of a new organism.

“But none of this is true of the human embryo, from the zygote and blastula stages onward.  The combining of the chromosomes of the spermatozoon and of the oocyte generates what human embryology identifies as a new, distinct, and enduring organism.  Whether produced by fertilization or by Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (SCNT) or some other cloning technique, the human embryo possesses all of the genetic material needed to inform and organize its growth. The direction of its growth is not extrinsically determined, but is in accord with the genetic information within it.   Nor does it merely possess organizational information for maturation; rather, it has an active disposition to develop itself using that information.  The human embryo is, then, a whole and distinct human organism—an embryonic human being.

“If the embryo were not a complete organism, then what could it be?  Unlike the spermatozoa and the oocytes, it is not merely a part of a larger organism, namely, the mother or the father.  Nor is it a disordered growth or gamete tumor such as a complete hydatidiform mole or teratoma.

“Perhaps someone will say that the early embryo is an intermediate form, something which regularly emerges into a whole human organism but is not one yet.  But what could cause the emergence of the whole human organism, and cause it with regularity?  As I have already observed, it is clear that from the zygote stage forward the major development of this organism is controlled and directed from within, that is, by the organism itself.  So, after the embryo comes into being, no event or series of events occur which could be construed as the production of a new organism; that is, nothing extrinsic to the developing organism itself acts on it to produce a new character or new direction in development.”

In a footnote, George says that “The testimony of leading embryology textbooks is that a human embryo is—already and not merely potentially—a new individual member of the species Homo sapiens.  His or her potential, assuming a sufficient measure of good health and a suitable environment, is to develop by an internally directed process of growth through the further stages of maturity on the continuum that is his or her life.”

He also addresses the question of twinning.  “Some have claimed that the phenomenon of monozygotic twinning shows that the embryo in the first several days of its gestation is not a human individual.  The suggestion is that as long as twinning can occur what exists is not yet a unitary human being, but only a mass of cells—each cell being totipotent and allegedly independent of the others.

“It is true that if a cell or group of cells is detached from the whole at an early stage of embryonic development then what is detached can sometimes become a distinct organism and has the potential to develop to maturity as distinct from the embryo from which it was detached (this is the meaning of “totipotent”).  But this does nothing to show that before detachment the cells within the human embryo constituted only an incidental mass. 

“Consider the parallel case (discussed by Aristotle) of division of a flatworm.  Parts of a flatworm have the potential to become a whole flatworm when isolated from the present whole of which they are part.  Yet no one would suggest that prior to the division of a flatworm to produce two whole flatworms the original flatworm was not a unitary individual.   Likewise, at the early stages of human embryonic development, before specialization by the cells has progressed very far, the cells or groups of cells can become whole organisms if they are divided and have an appropriate environment after the division.  But that fact does not in the least indicate that prior to the twinning event the embryo is other than a unitary, self-integrating, actively developing human organism.  It certainly does not show that the embryo is a mere ‘clump of cells.’”

Stay tuned, next installment will address the philosophical question.