Is a fertilized egg a person?

Scientific American reports:

In Colorado voters shot down Amendment 48, the “Personhood Initiative,” by a three-to-one margin. The measure would have defined human life as starting “from the moment of fertilization”—which in essence would have made abortion a crime and put the brakes on embryonic stem cell research there.

I’m not pro-abortion by any stretch of the imagination, and neither is my wife. We (or more strictly she) would never have an abortion, and I wouldn’t encourage anyone to have an abortion. I do support abortion (albeit with some reluctance) when the life or health of the mother is seriously in danger. I can understand when someone chooses to have an abortion because of some serious developmental abnormality of the fetus. I’m pro-contraception. I’m pro sex-education (countries with better sex ed have lower teen pregnancy rates).

But I consider the idea of legally defining a fertilized egg as a person with legal rights as not just silly but dangerous. Here are some things I wonder about, should a fertilized egg ever be considered as a person with legal rights:

• When a child dies in the home there is an investigation because of the possibility of infanticide or neglect. Given that about 1/3 of conceptions end in miscarriage or the death of the embryo, should we investigate every miscarriage as a possible crime in case negligence (or worse) was involved?
• It’s not commonly acceptable to freeze one’s children. Should parents be legally able to freeze embryos as part of IVF treatment?
• In IVF treatment, should it be legal to discriminate between embryos that are malformed and stand no chance of developing normally, and those that are considered viable? Should all have an equal chance to be implanted?
• Should a father be able to sue on behalf of a frozen embryo, demanding that it be allowed to gestate and come to term?
• What if there are a dozen frozen embryos? Two dozen?
• With advances in cloning, all stem cells will have the potential to become a full human being. Should stem cells be granted legal rights?
• Should we issue “conception certificates” to all fertilized eggs to legally mark their personhood (after all we keep track of persons)?
• Should parents have to file a death certificate in the case of miscarriage?
• Is it murder for a surgeon to remove an embryo that’s developing abnormally and might kill the mother — as in an ectopic pregnancy?
• Should women be charged with murder if they use IUDs or hormonal contraception? Should they be subject to the death penalty in states where that method of punishment exists?

I’m sympathetic that people want to create a clear line. My personal feeling is that at some point a developing fetus does attain some kind of personhood, in that killing it deliberately should be criminalized (with health exceptions, etc). If a woman and her 8 month-old fetus are murdered, for example, I’m sympathetic to the idea that there be two murder charges. But there are few clear-cut lines in nature, and fertilization is not to my mind a socially acceptable line to draw for personhood.

4 Responses to “Is a fertilized egg a person?”

1. Kimberly says:

   November 6, 2008 at 3:01 pm

   You don’t know me, but I love your blog. I thought you might find the link below to a recent New Yorker article interesting. It’s called “Red Sex, Blue Sex: Why do so many evangelical teen-agers become pregnant?” by Margaret Talbot

   http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/03/081103fa_fact_talbot

   Thanks for posting cool stuff,
   Kim
2. bodhipaksa says:

   November 6, 2008 at 3:09 pm

   Thanks for your kind comment, and for the link to the article. I’m about to head to a(nother) birthday party for my daughter — this one in her daycare — but I’ll read it when I get back.

   Are you on Twitter? It’s a great way to network. You can join me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/Bodhipaksa
3. bodhipaksa says:

   November 6, 2008 at 3:10 pm

   PS I made the graphic myself. I’m vainfully (I know that’s not a word) pleased with it!
4. Rob R says:

   November 6, 2008 at 9:30 pm

   This is very close to the position I hold though I would say I am more than sympathetic to the notion that late term (and even mid term) abortions are murderous.

   I don’t have a lot of confidence that a fertilized egg is a person. Given what we know, it has no immeadiate potential for consciousness (like a sleeping or comatose person).

   Also, the existence of those with chimerism I think has made a more difficult position for those who would argue for early personhood. Chimerism (I might be spelling this wrong, it’s a condition named for a mythical beast made of many different animals) is a condition where one person has two Different sets of DNA. Two different eggs that would otherwise become fraternal twins fuse together to develope into one person who have specific organs with one set of DNA and other organs with a different set. My impression is not that this is like where one twin is absorbed into the other and leaves undeveloped body parts in the other twin (as this also happens but I’m geussing it happens at a later stage and may very well be considered a death of a twin). It’s just one fully functioning human where the different sets of tissues developed as fully as needed and as programed within a solitary individual. So I considered that this could happen not just to fraternal twin eggs, but I wondered, why not with an egg that splits into two, that could become a set of identical twins, but instead just fuses back together to become a chimera with only one set of DNA (and of course, there’d never be a way to figure out who that would be). So here’s the problem for the notion that personhood occurs right at conception. It’s a little odd to say that you have a person when in fact, that person could become more than one person. And it gets stranger when you could view that person as splitting into two complete persons only to fuse back into one. And what if that fusion happened only seconds after the split? Did someone die? On what basis could we conclude that especially when no cells were absorbed into the other entity, but rather they just continued to form as one whole person. So when an egg is fertilized, you could have something that will be two people who could become one person again. It’s a very strange notion and it seems unlikely

   As I am not a materialist, I believe there is more to us than the matter and even the structure and function of our physical selves which of course offers a relevent. But I also have a belief as to how that etherial other part of us comes about. The view I hold is called emergence dualism which suggests that the soul/mind somehow arises from the body in a way that is analogous to the way that a magnetic field emanates from a magnet. This view, unlike more traditional dualisms, has the strength of explaining a causal connection between body and soul/mind where the body need not be viewed as a liability and unfortunate shell but explains that the body and soul are a unit, and of course, though the soul is generated by the body, the possibility for existence after death is not ruled out.

   The relevence to this I believe is that really, for the soul to be generated, you need a neural net and without a neural net, it’s not clear on what basis that the embryo/fetus (I don’t know when the nervous system starts to develope) would have a soul.

   I don’t know as much as I would like about this view but the thing is, I don’t have enough confidence in it to gamble a baby’s life on it. As a Christian, another way to approach it is this: Can a fertilized egg bear the image of God. I don’t know enough about either to rule that out. And I think it is very possible that a fertilized egg was once God incarnate (then again, maybe it was going to be God incarnate after a point… but I don’t know that).

   So supposedly, we aren’t supposed to bring in religious concerns into policy considerations because serpation of church and state don’t allow it, but I don’t buy that that is the best interpretation of the first ammendment. And according to Obama, if we do have religious considerations, we have to translate them into universal values, but the problem with that is that some universal values such as opposing murder and supporting the right of all to life have consequences when we synthesize them with religious considerations that may not be universally translatable themselves such that if we accept that murder always to be opposed by the authorities and we sincerely believe that an unborn entity is a human, even all the way to conception, then our sincerety in the belief has consequences for the policies and politicians that we’d support.

   I don’t know when an egg/embryo/fetus becomes a significant being worth protecting as much as any other human, but I just don’t see that as an argument for abortion and I see it rather as the opposite. If you think someone might be in there, it’s not prudent to terminate. If a buildings demolition expert was just told someone might be inside the building, I don’t think he would push the button to blow it up. It just seems to me that the best words on the topic were written thousands of years ago: As you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything. Ecclesiastes 11:5

   And if the pro lifers are wrong about early term abortions, I think it would still be a much lesser evil to ban all abortions than to continue to permit all abortions including late term abortions (Of course I agree with the exception of the life of the mother because her life is not less important than the life of the unborn baby. I think it’s the only true instance where it makes sense to speak of a choice in this matter as a right).