Dignitas Personae: A Christian Scientist Comments

National Catholic Reporter
December 12, 2008

Scientist reacts to Vatican bioethics paper
By William B. Neaves

Scientific research and medical applications arising from such research should be guided by a moral framework that both values human life and protects the dignity of individuals. Dignitas Personae, the new Vatican bioethics document issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith with the approval of Pope Benedict XVI, aims to do this. As such, it deserves thoughtful consideration by scientists who develop reproductive and therapeutic technologies, by physicians who apply them, and by the people who benefit from them.

Dignitas Personae catalogues the consequences of actions derived from a moral framework based on a point of view about personhood — a view that is not shared by all. This point of view accords the dignity of a person to the first cell that results from fertilization of an egg by a sperm. If this premise is accepted, all the consequences detailed in Dignitas Personae logically follow.

These consequences include the condemnation of any pharmacological intervention that prevents the products of fertilization from implanting in a womb (the document says anyone using such a pill “intends abortion”). It censures the use of in vitro fertilization (IVF), a process that has helped bring to birth 3.5 million children of infertile parents. It denounces the adoption of already-produced IVF embryos that will otherwise be discarded, even when these IVF embryos could enable infertile couples to bear children. Not surprisingly, it proscribes seeking cures to diseases through research with embryonic stem cells.

Christians, of whom this writer is one, can find scant guidance on when personhood begins by reading the Bible. Some cite Jeremiah 1:5 (“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations”), but many readers find this to be a statement of Jeremiah’s preordination, not the inception of his personhood. Other find Ecclesiastes 11:5 more relevant (“As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother’s womb, so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things”).

Indeed, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith noted more than three decades ago that it is not within the competence of human knowledge to determine when God infuses an immortal soul into a developing person. (See “Declaration on Procured Abortion [1]” by Sacred Congregation Prefect Franciscus Cardinal Seper, Nov. 18, 1974, footnote # 19)

Eight centuries ago, Saint Thomas Aquinas emphasized the importance of the embryo’s physical development in building a suitable home for the soul. The poet Dante Alighieri, who lived and wrote into the early 14th century, described the contemporary Catholic view of ensoulment in the following passage from the Purgatorio:

Open thy breast to the truth that follows and know that as soon as the articulation of the brain is perfected in the embryo, The First Mover turns to it, rejoicing over such a handiwork of nature, and breathes into it a new spirit full of power, which draws into its own substance that which it finds active there and becomes a single soul that lives and feels and revolves upon itself.
—Canto 25:67-75

The point of view articulated by Aquinas and Dante is still compelling, and it comports with recent insights from biology and medicine supporting the idea that personhood is established after the products of fertilization are implanted in the uterus. For example, it is well established that separately conceived fraternal twins occasionally fuse in the mother’s reproductive tract and merge into a single embryo that is implanted and gestated in the uterus. When the fraternal twins are of different sexes, the birthed child is a chimera, endowed with a mixture of cells carrying either the female sex chromosome or the male sex chromosome. If personhood is established at the time of fertilization, such natural chimeras pose the difficult question of how two people become a single person.

An alternative point of view to the Vatican’s, embraced by many Christians, is that personhood occurs after successful implantation in the mother’s uterus, when individual ontological identity is finally established. This way of thinking about when a person comes into existence reconciles another otherwise troublesome reality of normal, natural human reproduction: in many (and probably most) instances, the single cell resulting from fertilization of an egg by a sperm perishes in the woman’s reproductive tract and never implants in the uterus. Only after implantation does a birthed baby become highly probable. Would God have ordained that most people should die in the first two weeks of existence, long before seeing the light of day? No human being can know, but it seems unlikely.

If one accepts the viewpoint that personhood begins after implantation, the moral framework guiding the development and application of medical technology to human reproduction and treatment of disease looks very different from that described in Dignitas Personae.

In the alternative moral framework, taking a pill to prevent the products of fertilization from implanting in a uterus is morally acceptable. Using IVF to complete the family circle of couples otherwise unable to have children is an unmitigated good. Encouraging infertile couples with defective gametes to adopt already-produced IVF embryos that will otherwise be discarded is a laudable objective. And using embryonic stem cells to seek cures becomes a worthy means of fulfilling the biblical mandate to heal the sick.

William B. Neaves is president and CEO of the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, Mo.