Why we don't convince some reasonable people about embryos

Robby George and many others have made strong arguments in this blog for the continuity of human life and dignity. Yet some rational folks on the other side find those arguments not so much unconvincing as absurd. Witness the ridicule that the defense of human embryos sometimes draws. It is this sense of absurdity that must be explained.

I submit that the pro-life arguments seem absurd to any listener who has in the back of the mind a sense that the embryo or fetus is being constructed in the womb. Here’s an analogy: At what point in the automobile assembly line process can a “car’ be said to exist? I suppose most of us would point to some measure of minimum functionality (viability), like having wheels and/or a motor, but some might insist on the need for windshield wipers or might say it’s not fully a car until it rolls out onto the street (is born). We would all understand, however, that there’s no clearly “right” answer as to when a car is there. And we would also agree that someone who claimed the car to be present from the insertion of the first screw at the very beginning of the assembly line would be taking an utterly absurd position. To someone who conceives of gestation as intrauterine construction, pro-life people sound just this absurd. For a thing being constructed is truly not there until it is nearly complete. (Moving from ordinary language to metaphysics, we would say that a constructed thing does not have its essential form until it is complete or nearly complete. And it can’t be that thing without the form of that thing.)

Now, this way of thinking (treating gestation as construction, fabrication, making) has not only intuitive appeal today but a grand pedigree. For thousands of years it was the dominant (though not the exclusive) way to conceive of what was happening in the womb. Thus Job exclaims to God “You poured me out like milk and curdled me like cheese. You clothed me with skin and flesh and knit me together…” No one knew of the ovum (until the 1830s), and, despite its name, semen ("seed") didn’t seem to develop on its own. So it made sense to posit an outside constructor or fabricator, either God or one of the parents, who worked inert seminal material up into a human shape during the early stages of pregnancy. And, quite reasonably, abortion of this still relatively amorphous mass was not considered the destruction of someone with an essential human form.

But at quickening (enlivening), the unborn child exhibited something that no merely constructed thing could do: it could move itself. [This was judged to occur in mid-pregnancy, a position that did not become untenable until, again, after the 1830s when the invention of the stethoscope first made possible the detection of the early fetal heartbeat.] The greatest of all fabrications must therefore have taken place, an animal soul (anima) must have been inserted by God. From this point on, construction from the outside was over and development from the inside began. And so now abortion constituted homicide. For, unlike a constructed entity, which (as we have seen) is not present until nearly the end of the construction process, a developing being is already there as soon as it starts developing.

Why does self-development entail continuity of being? There are many ways to access the answer here. For Heideggerian aficionados, one could point to “de-velop” as an un-veiling or un-wrapping (cf. “en-velop”). [Heidegger would no doubt privilege German and point to “ent-wickeln” (un-wrap). In Spanish, one would unwrap in the sense of un-roll: des-arrollar]. One could also just point to ordinary language today, in which development connotes continuity. We would say that the first little spout we saw come out of the ground five years ago is the same plant as the pear tree we now see, unless someone told us that some construction had occurred (i.e. that the pear branches had been grafted onto non-pear stock).

But the difference between making and developing is not just an accident of language. Suppose we’re back in the pre-digital days and you’ve just taken a fabulous photo, one you know you will prize, with your Polaroid camera. (Say it’s a picture of a jaguar that has now darted back into the jungle so that the photo is unrepeatable.) You are just starting to let the photo hang out to develop when I grab it and rip its cover off (perhaps because I’m eager to see it; my reason doesn’t matter here) thus destroying it. What would you think if I responded to your dismay with the assertion “Hey man, it was still in the brown-smudge stage. Why should you care about brown smudges?” I submit that you would find my defense utterly absurd. [By contrast, if I had simply destroyed a blank, unexposed piece of your film, you would have been much less upset. You really would have lost little more than a smudge. Passive potential does not count for much. Only developing potential already contains its own form (or essence or identity), is already the what that it is in the process of manifesting.]

I conclude that pro-choice folks think pro-life claims re embryos to be not only wrong but absurd whenever (even unconsciously, in the back of their minds) they think that embryos are under construction in the womb. And pro-life folks find pro-choice denials of prized human dignity in embryos to be equally absurd whenever they think that the unborn child develops (indeed, develops itself, unlike the Polaroid photo) from the moment of fertilization.

The two sides are not quite parallel in this, however: Human beings do develop. To think they are constructed is flat error. This error remains intuitively plausible and has a decent cultural pedigree, so those who make it should not be dismissed as utterly irrational or evil, even though they may seem so from the viewpoint of one who bears in mind the facts of human development. But they are absolutely wrong. We know with certainty that quickening is an illusion, that the child is developing from the beginning, not being made from the outside, for its form lies within it, in its active potency, in its activated DNA. From the point of view of natural science (and natural theology) delayed ensoulment has lost its reason for being and Occam’s razor should cut it out of our debates.