Jonas Salk – When Does an Embryo Acquire Human Rights?
“At what point does a baby get human rights?” When Rick Warren asked this question of the presidential candidates in 2008, the answers were miles apart. This question is at the pinnacle of a cascade of moral and ethical questions that nobody even asked a mere fifty years ago. In 1962, Watson and Crick shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the double helix structure of DNA. The fields of genetics and medicine would never be the same. If not for that discovery, we would not today be contemplating the possibility that human cells, specifically stem cells, and most particularly embryonic stem cells, hold the promise to cure diseases that disable and even kill many people. We would not be asking if human embryos have human rights.
Our concerns about human rights center on the definition of the word human. The disputation over this definition is intense. A human being has a right to life that is protected in all societies. Even cannibalistic societies do not eat their own; they eat their enemies, and the eating of human enemies is actually a back-handed compliment to the human quality of the enemy. In other settings, there have been exceptions to the rule of the sanctity of human life that give rise to the deep questions associated with the decision to perform research using human embryonic stem cells.
In some societies, deformed or weak babies have been exposed and abandoned as a matter of course, due to their prospects of becoming a drain on the limited resources of a family or tribe. Likewise, tribal cultures often abandoned elderly people for the simple reason that the tribe needed to move and the elderly could not keep up. To this day we still ask ourselves about the level of investment that is morally required of us for the disabled, the elderly, the weak, the chronically ill, and the comatose.
However, all these questions arise after the birth of a baby. Until recently, our moral questions about the unborn asked when, why and how an abortion might be justified. As medical science pushed the horizon of newborn survivability ever closer to the time of conception, the questions about human rights became more challenging. Then medical science began to intervene at conception, thereby creating a whole new set of questions moving in the other direction. It almost seems perverse that the very science that provides hope to infertile couples has led us all to ask whether an embryo is a human being. Those infertile couples who have been able to bring a baby into their families after in vitro fertilization would almost certainly vote for the humanity of that embryo. Yet, these couples rarely implant and bring to term all the embryos they create. Those “leftover” embryos have incredibly become the center of the firestorm around the human rights of the unborn.
The arguments are intense and heartfelt. Yet one fact seems quite clear. Every human being was once a fertilized human egg, a human zygote. Every living person was once a mass of cells inside a blastocyte that successfully implanted in the wall of a human uterus. The fact that some zygotes never divide, or that some blastocytes never implant, seems irrelevant in the greater scheme of things. To deny that the zygote or the blastocyte or the embryo is human begs the question of the humanity of a newborn baby. After all, many newborn babies die quickly. Many do not live to be even two years old. Would it be proper to say that any newborn who fails to survive his second birthday is not a human? What if he never reaches his eighteenth birthday? Or his thirtieth? Or his seventy-second? There is no point in the timeline from conception to death at which it could credibly be said that this living thing is not a human being. If we refuse kill a baby in order to create a cure for Parkinsonism, why would we kill an embryo? If we object to killing a young woman in her thirties to create a cure for breast cancer, why would we kill her unimplanted blastocyte?
Human beings have always protected human life. In most societies, the failure to protect life carries almost as much stigma as deliberate murder. Historically, as societies mature, they show more compassion, not less, for the weak, whether young or old. Nothing is weaker or more vulnerable than an unimplanted blastocyte, yet before Einstein was a famous physicist, he was, in fact, an unimplanted blastocyte. So was Mother Teresa. Likewise Jonas Salk, Michelangelo and Moses. Humans do not spring full-blown from someone’s head. They are created when egg and sperm embrace to become a zygote. At that moment, everything that will be our next Jonas Salk or our next Mother Teresa is already in place. Human life has human value at conception, and that is when that new human being acquires human rights. We dare not give the newly-conceived human less value than an athlete with a spinal cord injury. If a zygote dies of natural causes, if a blastocyte never implants, if a newborn baby never breathes, if a grown man’s heart fails, if an elderly woman falls asleep and never wakes up, all these deaths are natural and not in our power to prevent. However, if we start deliberately destroying human life, whether for our own convenience or with the misguided notion that the life of a blastocyte has less value than the life of a patient with diabetes, we will all find ourselves looking over our shoulders at our neighbors. If some human life is not sacred, who gets to decide which ones are worthless?
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