Evangelicals and the Brave New World: Why Natural Law Can No Longer Be Ignored

September 6, 2006

Evangelicals and the Brave New World: Why Natural Law Can No Longer Be Ignored

Infertile couples desperate to conceive children are turning increasingly to fertility specialists for help. Yet, widespread use of assisted reproductive technology (ART) has led to a completely unforeseen consequence: the creation of the world's largest population of frozen human embryos. That reality has ignited a vigorous moral debate among scientists, politicians, theologians, and parents about what should be done with the surplus store of nascent human life.

The challenge for pro-life evangelicals is to develop systematic moral reasoning that can be applied to a range of issues including embryo adoption, human embryonic stem cell research, ART, “therapeutic cloning,” genetic engineering, and birth control. Evangelicals tend to be pragmatic, wedding political activism with biblical appeals, but this has resulted in moral reflection operating on a mostly private and intuitive plane. The tragic pitfall with this style of ethical decision-making is that adverse spiritual and moral consequences often go undetected. When faced with new advances in reproductive technology, this inability to approach new developments within a consistent moral framework can prove to be a dangerous weakness.

Currently, in the United States alone, nearly 500,000 human embryos are being cryopreserved at some 430 fertility clinics. A staggering 88 percent of these embryos, which are only a few days old and much smaller than the dot on this i , were created by doctors for use in some form of assisted reproduction.

The most common ART technique is in vitro fertilization with embryo transfer (IVF-ET), in which a woman is induced to produce multiple eggs where four to six of the most viable are retrieved and then fertilized in the laboratory, with the resulting embryos transferred to the woman's uterus. At the best clinics, the success rate for each in vitro attempt is between 25 and 50 percent.

Each in vitro attempt can cost anywhere from $4,000 to $18,000 (or more) for doctor's fees, plus thousands more for drugs to stimulate ovulation. To decrease the probability of complications associated with higher order multiple pregnancies only two to three embryos are usually transferred to the uterus in each in vitro attempt.

ART doctors typically respond by producing more embryos than are feasible to implant in utero at a single time. This overproduction of embryos requires the surplus to be stored for later possible use.

With the routine overproduction of embryos in IVF-ET questions arise that science alone cannot answer. Technology, it seems, has outpaced our understanding of the fundamental legal, political, theological, and moral issues in the creation and management of human embryos.

Christians and defenders of human dignity who acknowledge embryos to be preborn persons have a dual responsibility to protect the innocent and also to do no harm. The stakes are high because, as Ron Stoddart founder of Nightlight Christian Adoptions stresses, “An embryo is not a potential human life--it is human life with potential.”

Four U.S. embryo adoption programs facilitate embryo adoption: Nightlight Christian Adoptions, Center for Human Reproduction, Bethany Christian Services, and the National Embryo Donation Center. The goal of each is to transfer frozen donor embryos to infertile recipients who intend to use them to procreate.

At first glance, embryo adoption appears to be a life-affirming response to the vast number of frozen embryos being stored at fertility clinics. And it certainly is compared to the 100 percent mortality rate for human embryos used in stem cell research. Yet, it is not without problems. In embryo adoption, as in IVF-ET, it often takes repeated attempts before a successful pregnancy is achieved with frozen donor embryos.

At this point, what is the relevant moral difference between IVF-ET and embryo adoption? Have the embryos lost in unsuccessful thawing and transfer attempts been treated properly as individually unique and personal beings created in God's image? Can any form of technology that instrumentalizes life, regardless of the ultimate use to which it is put, be morally satisfying? These questions point to a moral Catch-22 for Christians who support IVF-ET and embryo adoption. Embryo adoption is, at best, a response to the embryo surplus created by IVF-ET, which itself raises fundamental moral questions that Protestant ethicists have not yet probed in sufficient depth.

Among Protestants in general, there is an absence of critical moral discernment on bioethical issues outside the scope of abortion debate. This stems, in part, from Protestant skepticism toward natural law (God's will as expressed in creation, imprinted on the conscience, and known through reason) and from an underdeveloped role for the legal, as opposed to the teaching, aspect of ethics. Informing people what principles ought to guide their conduct and what actions are morally illicit is the teaching aspect of ethics, whereas developing theological and philosophical criteria to adjudicate the morality and severity of illicit human acts is the legal aspect.

The now-neglected legal aspect of Protestant ethics was once a vital part of Anglican and Puritan moral theology. Older Protestant luminaries developed texts on “cases of conscience,” which attempted to discern whether a specific behavior was right or wrong and to evaluate the moral gravity of wrong behavior. They were assisted in this project by their appropriation of Christian Aristotelian philosophy and the natural-law tradition.

Routine overproduction of embryos and high mortality rates suggest that IVF-ET degrades and instrumentalizes the very life it seeks to create. The fundamental purpose of every embryo is to realize its own life: to fulfill its divine purpose of achieving life as a rational, social, creative, spiritual, and morally free and responsible person. In assisted reproduction and cryopreservation--unlike in normal conception and gestation--the natural progression of an embryo's life from potential to actual can be temporarily interrupted, stalled for a time, or worse, permanently thwarted from achieving its purpose.

So aside from the issue of what to do with surplus embryos, the more fundamental question remains: How will pro-life Christian supporters of IVF-ET and embryo adoption resolve the moral Catch-22 brought to light by the vast stores of nascent human life? Protestants need to think seriously about this moral paradox and to retrieve older, more sophisticated traditions in ethics--such as natural law--to provide assistance.

This commentary is adapted from a longer essay that first appeared in the July/August edition of BreakPoint Worldview magazine.

Comments

Anon: garfield_ironsides@yahoo.com

Blah blah blah.

This article isn't for micro-biologists and Greek philosophy majors, it's for Christians. The word games are unnecessary, and silly in my opinion.

As a matter of faith, if life begins at conception, IVF is wrong.

Neil Silva: neilsilva@gmail.com

With due respect, I submit that the ethical issues in the debate have been obscured by its overlong concentration on the definition of ApersonA. This is not to say that such ethical-legal discussion is irrelevant, especially considering the wording of the 5th and 14th Amendments and the post-New Deal interpretation of substantive due process; however, insofar as ethical-legal reasoning applies categories to empirical data, we must situate the basis of the debate in the latter before debating its behavioral ramifications.

In sum, we note that the debate centers on the question of whether, and where, the developmental changes among early prenatal, later prenatal, and postnatal homo sapiens justify substantial differences in their ethical-legal treatment.
(a) From a microbiological perspective, it must be noted that there is no radical distinction between the two stages as would justify similarly radical ethical-legal distinctions, for while there are phenotypical differences, there are little/no genotypical ones. The growth and development of the early prenatal to later prenatal stage is primarily defined by characteristics and codon/nucleotide patterns imprinted in the first stages of embryonic development, notwithstanding qualitative structural changes from embryo to fetus; and while the environmental location change at birth causes peripheral chemical changes, basic biochemical characteristics like nucleic acid and blood antigen composition remain the same. The more fundamental changes occur at the stage of fertilization, when chemical materials from gametes (ova, spermatozoa) combine into a new diploid cell.
(b) Closer to the ApersonA controversy is the possible change from the precognitive to the cognitive stage. The exact time of the shift is indeterminate, since it is less a once-for-all change than a gradual change, may differ among individuals, and is difficult to verify, with the criteria for verification being subject to some dispute. It is, however, generally conceded that there is a change in the manner of human functioning at this developmental junction, the details being uncertain.
Hence, verifiably radical changes only occur at two junctions, fertilization (AconceptionA) and cognition (Athe age of reasonA). With reference, therefore, to empirical data, it is more reasonable to assign cognition rather than birth as the demarcation, if any, between stringent and less stringent ethical-legal protection. The logically tenable alternatives are, thence, whether (i) to extend to born and preborn the customarily stringent protection accorded to born infants, or (ii) to give born infants the same treatment given to preborn (with due regard to viability) under the Roe decision. The former is often defended based on the ethical axiom of the fundamental unity and equality of human beings, while the latter position, notably examined by Mary Anne Warren in her Apostscript on infanticideA, is based on the postulated importance of intra-human classifications, e.g., WarrenAs distinction between biological/genetic vs. moral humans.
Decision on this and related points would, in our jurisdictions, be made by political bodies, including courts whose judges have preferred ideologies and that enforce legal norms decided through power-based processes. In view thereof, I submit that a prudential consideration of the issues would militate in favor of alternative (i) above. For one, termination of early-stage homo sapiens is relatively more irreversible than the alternative, and is thence more preferable in view of the legal indeterminacy of the issues involved. Moreover, the inevitable dominance of power-based processes, with their vulnerability to non-acceptable results even in less disputed issues, requires a presumption in favor of more maximal protection than less, of less irreversible actions, and in favor of continued biological functioning, which is a more a precondition to other functions than vice versa. These are without prejudice to other points, of course, but I think these are the more basic.

Philippok: philtomp@cablespeed.com

Catherine,

What punishment would you give to a woman who aborted her own fetus?

Catherine Robinson: cathyr@flex.com

So, you never existed before your brain was formed?

Is going from conceptus to fetus not a form of experience, even if you are "personally" never consciously aware of it?

What about that fascinating theory that every single cell in our bodies has some form of cognizance and memory?

Is a person with dementia no longer a person?

Is it just a body but not a person in a coma?

Is a one-year-old human child an inferior "person" to a much more mentally and physically advanced one-year-old chimp?
Isn't "personhood" more than just mental capacity and function?

Are human beings really only the sum of their biological parts, no different from "other" animals?

According to whom? And with what factual proof, as opposed to personal opinion? And so, why sould anyone listen to them?

A gorilla -- nurtured and trained by human persons -- who learns human sign language, is thus a "person"?

What about all us adult human beings who have not learned to sign? Does that make us non-persons?

Then it is possible for fully developed and adult human "persons" to produce other "persons" without the necessity of biology, even of gorillas, chimps, dogs, cats, pigs, and birds, simply through human-conceived training?

My cat, who has undeniable personality, but is unapologetically only a cat, is thus a "person"?

Why? My cat would have none of his human-interaction training, or "personality," if it weren't for his human owners. Among his own feline kind, he would be merely a cat, more or less adept at survival as a cat and only a cat.

And without the purposeful interference of human beings, he, like all other "domestic cats," would likely never have existed in the first place.

So, without the mediation of human persons, these animals are simply animals of their own kind, and never can go beyond the definite limitations of their own kind with their own kind -- even with our interference.

Gorillas may have a highly trainable brain, but among their own kind, they are merely gorillas. Koko has reached her limit; the chimps that have been taught sign have all reached their limits.
And we hear about these exceptional animals because they are exceptional; no others even within their species have attained the level of training these particular animals have, otherwise we would have daily stories of their achievements and accomplishments, too, wouldn't we?
Instead there are sad stories of how their likely mates or pals or offspring do not measure up and cannot seem to make the strides they have, and are often rejected; sad stories of maladjustment to their own kind. Because human persons tried to foist a deficient definition of human personhood onto them.

Through our humanizing they have been thrust into a twilight zone of neither being human nor being fully their own kind.

Despite the plain results of these experiments, still some of us call these non-human animal experiments "persons" who have "personhood," while human embryos, which can never be anything but human beings, are denied their obvious and rightful claim to be human beings with "personal life," or personhood, innately granted by virtue of their kind alone.

The trained gorillas, chimps, monekys, rabbits, rats, mice, dogs, cats, and other guinea pigs, can go no further because they are not human beings. They may have personalities, but they are not human persons. They never had the potential to be, as research exploring their potential and limits has shown.

Personhood doesn't naturally exist in our physical realm outside of its biological vehicle. A gorilla, no matter how well nurtured and trained, will never be a human person. A human being, even reared among wolves or alongside a chimp baby, is always innately endowed with something different -- personhood -- as studies have shown, while their canine or simian "siblings" are not.

A human conceptus is completely and only human. It is meant only to be human; it is genetically, physically, impossible for it to be anything else.
Its personhood is held intrinsic to it from conception, however unrealized at that point. The obvious missing element from the discussion is, if allowed to live and develop normally, it WILL be realized. It never "aquires" personhood. The nascent person is simply suspended and contained at that stage of development, like a runner at the starting line.

No gray area. It will never become Koko II.

No heap. Sand will never become human -- or gorilla. It is a clear fallacy -- the apples-and-oranges, or, if you like, the sand-to-human being, kind -- to reduce human beings at any developmental level to grains of sand.

An embryo is simply a human being in the early stages of its own personal development. It doesn't become less of a human life for being an embryo. Removing "grains" from it kills it, not heaps or unheaps it. It DEFINITELY cannot reach its human potential if it is killed!

The Greeks and their sadistic "gods" may have agreed with your argument, but the Jews and their just God wouldn't have.

While we hold many identical genes with gorillas, chimps, amebas, sponges, sharks, corn, birds, algea -- all life on earth -- we also hold unique genetic combinations that will only produce human beings, not any other life form. And conversely, all our non-human genetic relatives will never produce anything but what their genes call for.

Personhood is not mental capacity or function; it does not exist only in the mind; it is inherent in what it means to be a wholly human person, genetically similar to other earth life forms, but ultimately unique. Personhood is not something aquired along the way of biological development; it's part of the human package.

E.T. may have a personality, if he were real. But he would never be a human person, and the Yeti and Koko aren't, by virtue of their species, while all 25-week-old human fetuses have been for 25 weeks already.

And the point is we must deal with realities. We are, E.T. never was, except in the imagination of human persons (note, not in the mind of Koko or Yeti ;-). Ergo, he could only have whatever "personality" he was given by his human makers. He never was a potential human life, never was a human life with potential. He was only given any "life" through the unique imaginations of human beings, human persons.

And I think there's the nub: we are to other life forms on this planet -- notably demonstrated in Koko and other like experiments, and in the products of our fertile imaginations -- as God is to us. There can be no intelligent argument about "personhood" as long as God is barred from the discussion. Lots of "personality," perhaps, but no true personhood.

That 5-day old human blastocyst will never become anything else but what it is, a very young human being, however indistinguishable it may be to human eyes from other species' 5-day old blastocysts.

That's why we're not extractiing stem cells from other species' blastocysts; they're NOT HUMAN. They will never develop into anything useful to a human body; they will always only develop into things specific to their species.

Hmm.

And that human person the human blastocyst is the beginning of, will have the cognizant capacity as part of its personhood to recognize and acknowledge its Creator, and the free-will option to deliberately deny Him, something no human-trained animal has yet accomplished, and hasn't the ability to do, regardless of their abundance of human being-initiated training and "personality."

Even human beings with mental impairment are often able to understand the concept of God, and there are many inspirational stories of "mentally incompetent" individuals -- persons, and by the logical conclusion of the reasoning of the argument I'm addressing, including children -- teaching their "mental superiors" simple and pointed lessons about what it means to love and to know and love God -- what it means to be a human person.

Try getting that from Koko. She can be cute and cuddly, but can she teach you about being human and who God is?

Every human being, no matter at what stage of development, is still and only a human being, with all the rights and privileges of their older brothers. We are our brothers' keepers.
It is only we, human beings with a concept of (our own innate) personhood who confer any "rights and privileges" to other animals.

Ask a wild African lion to give you safe passage in the bush because you don't intend him any harm -- you respect his rights as a fellow person on this planet and ask his reciprocal respect. Or even try this with a "tame" lion that doesn't know you!

Triple dog dare ya!

But a 5-day old human blastocyst is expendable because it cannot manifest its personhood in a way you choose to recognize and respect?!

Yeah, this is logic. What's the difference, in this instance, between an older, powerful human person who can choose whether a blastocyst deserves the chance to realize the potential inherent in its human personal life, and that African lion in the bush -- or off the leash?

Don't you see? We call the shots; in the absence of a visible, physically present God we must answer to, we wield the power of life and death, and as human persons, with "personal life," with realized personhood, that ought to fill us with humble and holy fear!

CAN is not an OUGHT.

"Personal life" rightly matured ought to recognize value and dignity in even a "potential" human life as also a human life WITH potential. The very words connote immediacy and intrincity.
It is not possible to have a human life without "personal life" and personhood; it may be gorilla life or algea life, but not human.

You cannot have a human embryo without a "who" for this very reason: it cannot realize any other "potential" than that of human personhood. Just because YOU don't know who it is does not mean it is not a who! That's a ridiculous non seqitor.
It is a very young human being with the potential only to grow up to human adulthood. What stands between it and its potential is adult human persons who consciously deny it equal status.

None of us persons starts anywhere else.

It's only unclear if you choose not to see.
We call persons who objectify other human beings sociopaths and psychopaths. They have no ability to recognize their equals in other human beings. In their view, other human beings are without value and dignity, without "personal life" or personhood.

God save us from such inhumanity.

"Person" is that innate essence in a human being made in the image of God, and created within every human being from its beginning since God first created Adam.

You may recall that God created human beings in His image, THEN breathed animation into the physical body of Adam, not the other way around. God created the person, personhood, "personal life," BEFORE He created the physical body of Adam. Those who interpret the human body as the image of God and set that up as a straw man to deny God have it backwards.

Personhood is thus innate in us and includes our free will and the freedom to abuse it, resulting in sin; our conscience, which tells us when we abuse it by sinning, and manifests itself by either denying and defending the sin, however artfully, as Phil has done above, or by acknowledging, confessing, and repenting of it.
Being a person is to be a human being from conception, endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights (the Founders got that right), the first of which is to be protected from murder committed by our own kind.

The first sin was to pretend to be God, to claim the power of life and death: the knowledge of good and evil.

The second sin was like it: murder, acting on seizing the power of life and death in God's place.

Then, when God questioned the first murderer, Cain denied that he was his brother's keeper, that he had any responsibility for guarding and preserving his brother's life.

The Apostle John asked, "How can you love God, whom you have not seen, if you do not love your brother, whom you have seen?"

With the help of modern science and microscopes (otherwise we couldn't be discussinig blastocysts, etc.), we know every human being, every human person, complete with personhood and "personal life," starts at conception. There is no other beginning, and we are all charged with protecting human life, at whatever stage, not excused for ending it.
Nothing about being human, a person, having personhood, or "personal life," changes any of that, only our own sinful ego that refuses to let God alone be God alone.

HUMAN LIFE begins at conception. A HUMAN PERSON is conceived when the gametes join. Every single gene needed for a HUMAN PERSON is contained within the conceptus from the beginning. There is no point in time durning development when a "personal life" with value and dignity comes into separate existence.

That's why every single human being is different from every other. It isn't just biology or "personal life" that makes our infinte variety, but the very new, unique, whole life generated at fertilization.

Without stopping the natural development of that new life, it will realize its future, personal, and biological "potential." That's what LIFE is.

Life is potential; death is its thief.

Why aren't we content with extracting and developing stem cells from adults and umbilical cords, which don't pose any threat, real or imagined, against "potential" human beings? In more than 20 years of research, over and over again adult and umbilical cord stem cells have yielded good results already, while embryonic stem cells, however extracted and manipulated, have only produced negative and deadly results and implications.
If something works well, and its competitor doesn't, why promote and insist on the competitor? What is the rationale behind going with proven disaster while rejecting the proven potential and results of a non-controversial method?

That belies that this is not really about medical research and helping humanity through "stem cell research," but about who can dictate who lives and who dies for totally utilitarian reasons.

No grey areas, but plenty of hogwash.

Phil Tompkins: philtomp@cablespeed.com

In such discussions such as yours, it is useful to distinguish two different meanings of the term "life": 1) biological life and 2) what I will call personal life. Biological life is the coordinated functioning body parts. Personal life is the series of actions and experiences of the person whose life it is.
Biological life is the medium (instrument) through which personal life happens. Biological life is valuable not in itself, but because it supports personal life.
Personal life arises with the formation of the brain and the emergence of the mind. It is personal life that has value and dignity, that we have a right to, that we share with a loved one. It is what we fear losing and what we mourn the taking of.
What do we mean by "person"? It's difficult to come up with an abstract definition, but it's easy to give examples. Sam Brownback is a person. If E.T. were real, he would be a person.

There are grey areas. Is the Yeti or Koko the Gorilla (Koko has learned to sign - see www.koko.org) or a 25 week-old fetus a person? It's unclear.

But we are not in a grey area when we consider the 5 day old blastocyst. A blastocyst is not a person, because it cannot think or act or have experience. The life that begins at conception is all biological.
If you believe that a 5 day old blastocyst is a person, you commit what in ancient Greek philosophy is called the fallacy of the heap. Starting with a heap of sand, if you remove one grain at a time, you still are left with a heap. Continue the process until the "heap" consists of only a few grains.

At the 5-day stage of embryonic development when stem cells are extracted there is no one whose rights are violated or whose life is taken, because there is as yet no person, no "who." That is why donation to medical research of surplus embryos created in vitro is the moral equivalent to organ donation, not human sacrifice.

Having made this distinction, we can say that an embryo is both a potential (future) human life (personal) and a human life (biological) with potential.

Acton Commentary