In today's bioethical debates, three assumptions prevail: First, supporters of embryo-destructive research have science on their side; second, supporters of legalized abortion are defending women's reproductive health and reproductive freedom against those hostile to them; and finally, supporters of legalized abortion can appeal to the value of choice.
But these assumptions, worse than false, are irrelevant roadblocks to genuine debate about the hard questions they obscure. By removing them, I hope to clear the way for more fruitful discussion.
It is logically impossible — not unlikely or difficult, but impossible — for science alone to settle the morality of anything. In this case, embryological science has told us that destroying embryos might advance biomedical knowledge and the treatment of diseases. It also tells us what entities are destroyed — living members of the species Homo sapiens at their earliest stages of development. The embryo is no mere "cluster of cells" like a tumor or a mole. He or she (sex is determined from conception) is a whole human being developing by an internally directed, gapless process to the next stage of his or her life. [Moore and Persaud, The Developing Human: "Human development begins at fertilization ... [A] zygote ... marked the beginning of each of us as a unique individual." Gilbert, Developmental Biology: "Fertilization is the process whereby two sex cells (gametes) fuse together to create a new individual."]
What science cannot answer, though, is whether it is right or wrong (or should be legalized or outlawed) to kill some human beings (like embryonic human beings) in order to help others. For this, we need philosophy, especially ethics. So there is no "scientific view" on the morality of killing embryos for research. Science only clarifies which moral question is being asked — not how it should be answered. To have any position on the permissibility of embryo destruction is to have a more-than-scientific view. Embryo destruction's supporters are no more scientific — or less moralistic — than its opponents.
Second, when properly clarified, reproductive health and reproductive freedom have nothing to do with abortion, for no pro-lifer really opposes them and no pro-choicer can fruitfully appeal to them.
You are in good cardiovascular health if your heart and blood vessels are working to deliver oxygen to your body. It would be absurd if I blocked your body's oxygenation in the name of cardiovascular health, for I would be destroying the normal result of your bodily system's functioning and thus damaging — not enhancing — that part of your health.
Likewise, our fertility is central to our reproductive health. To destroy the new, developing human being in the name of reproductive health is to destroy the fruit of a bodily system under the guise of enhancing it. Whatever abortion's overall ethical status, it is, if anything, opposed to reproductive health.
But while it is contradictory to support abortion by appealing to reproductive health, it is only irrelevant and futile to rely on reproductive freedom. We all agree that no woman should be forced to reproduce. But once a new human being exists (according to embryology, at conception), the question is not whether the woman may reproduce — she already has — but whether she can end the life of the new human being. I am no less the result of my mother's reproductive choice now than in my first trimester. She was free to choose not to bring me about before I was conceived, but that has no bearing on whether she could end my life during pregnancy or can do so now.
Finally, the worst crime and the greatest act of love are both choices. To be "pro-choice" without qualification is to support allowing both. The question is not whether abortion involves someone's choice — like both slavery and philanthropy, it does — but whether it involves an injustice that should be outlawed to protect people's rights.
So the real debate is whether some human beings can justly be killed if others prefer it. If so, then you and your friends would have no intrinsic worth by the either/or fact of being what you are from conception to death: human beings. Your rights would depend instead on your having developed, to some arbitrary (hence unjustly exclusive) degree, some attribute that enough people with the power to kill you find interesting. Consistency would entail that anyone with less of that attribute be your expendable inferior and that the rights of those with more of it should trump your own rights. Equality would be a pious superstition.
If this is the correct position, then let's abandon contradictory or irrelevant appeals to science, reproductive health and freedom and choice — and acknowledge the sweeping consequences of rejecting the central principle of democracy: human equality. Sherif Girgis '08, a philosophy major from Dover, Del., writes on behalf of Princeton Pro-Life, which just concluded its celebration of Respect Life Week. He can be reached at sgirgis@princeton.edu.
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