Are `Pre-Embryos' Human?

Commonweal, June 20, 1997 by Sidney Callahan

What else could they be?

Mr. Randolfe Wicker, head of the Cloning Rights United Front in New York, intends to clone himself as soon as he can find a scientist to cooperate. According to a story in the New York Times (May 25,1997), Wicker claims that his right to be cloned should not be any more the business of the government than "a woman's decision to have an abortion is." Not surprisingly, he's also enthusiastic about cloning to further research in disease prevention.

So opens another round in the debate over the status of embryonic life. Prolife persons should not become too encouraged by recent votes to ban partial-birth abortions because a revulsion toward late abortion-infanticides won't be much help in protecting early embryonic lives. Since embryos don't resemble tiny babies, it will be an uphill countercultural struggle to ban RU 486 or other morning-after pills. Embryos in Petri dishes, whether clones or not, will be even harder to protect since they will be covered by the mantle of scientific research.

Even some Catholic moral theologians argue that a conceptus or zygote does not reach the status of a human individual until after implantation in the placenta takes place. Only after about two weeks, when the possibility of twinning is over, does the implanted embryo develop "a primitive streak." This integration and orientation of a body marks "irreversible individuality," since before this stage all the cells of the zygote are equipotential. For some of these thinkers, who sometimes employ the dodgy term "pre-embryo," human conception is a process which is not completed until implantation.

If only I could agree with these arguments; then I could also agree that certain abortifacient drugs, selection procedures, and embryo experiments could be approved. Catholic moral theologians proposing delayed hominization rely upon the argument that the form of the human body is necessary in order to have "ensoulment" or the creation of an individual human person. After all, goes their argument, no "person" can exist until irreversible individuality has been achieved.

But how can this be? My reading of the new evolutionary biology assures me that species and population membership is the key component of identity. As Stephen Jay Gould writes in a recent article on how a new species emerges, "individuals do not branch, only populations do." Individuals depend for their nature on their being a member of a species, and no one doubts that once the process of fertilization or syngamy takes place, the human conceptus is a member of Homo sapiens. At that point, processing the inherited species-specific genetic information produces human status.

Individuals depend upon the population as a whole, which exists before and beyond them. Group facts and entities really exist. A family exists before offspring; a team is more than its players. A conceptus is human when it is part of the human species. Of course, the incredibly dynamic potential of human embryos is also crucial, but even when this human potential will not have any chance or probability of fulfillment due to natural or human interventions, the embryo is still human.

Morally then, I must conclude that human status arises from membership in the one human species or one human family, which brings with it human dignity and equal worth with all other members. Achieving individuality is less important than collective identity. Besides, every living being is perpetually involved in dynamic processes of development and differentiation, as well as processes of de-individuation and disintegration, on the way to death. When the genetic program that keeps a body together winds down, different systems begin to fall apart.

Moreover, if irreversible differentiated individuality becomes the crucial marker for human status, then what happens to the status of Siamese twins or of multiple individuation: autistic children, those with various dementias, or cases of multiple personality disorders? For those who argue that having the form of an individuated body is necessary for ensoulment, I would offer the alternative proposal that form inheres in the genetic information in the species rather than the individual. If form means active information shaping a coherent entity over time, the genetic information we inherit provides our human form; it is our formal cause.

As for "ensoulment," it's a concept I'm not sure I understand. But it seems doubtful to me that ensoulment of human beings should take place one by one only when a "primitive streak" appears. Would it not make more sense to see humanity's special giftedness to be a collective creative gift to the whole human species from its inception?

I am encouraged in this collectivist approach by remembering that the gospel seems to insist that humans are members of one another in one body. While we all fell in Adam, we are all redeemed in Christ because the Word becomes flesh. Our collective membership in one unified body or one human family seems to be necessary if Christ's redemption is effected for all, once and for all. Humans have been created in the image of God, but the fact that God actually becomes one with humankind ensures human dignity and worth. Even including embryos?