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 esearch
on stem cells taken from embryos may have the potential to cure
man's ills, as we're told, but so far it's doing more to cloud men's
minds. This is true even in the case of as clever a mind as that
of Robert Wright, the Slate columnist. Earlier this week,
he
wrote an article arguing that pro-lifers should not object to
the research. (I take it that Wright is not himself a pro-lifer,
but in the course of his argument is trying to sketch, for those
of us who are, a more defensible position than the one most of us
hold.)
Wright's major points are that the embryos are going to be discarded
anyway and that it is possible to draw a valid moral distinction
an embryo in a womb and one in a petri dish. An
editorial in NR addressed these points and I won't go
into them again here too deeply. The latter point simply baffles
me: I have no idea how anyone could imagine that location would
be a morally relevant criterion here. Wright says that Orrin Hatch's
position — that location and fertilization are the necessary
and sufficient conditions for personhood — "is a perfectly
coherent position, devoid of internal contradictions." I suppose
that's true, just as the position that personhood also requires
the presence of a big toe, or residence in a temperate clime, would
be coherent and devoid of internal contradictions.
Wright makes a subsidiary point, though, that is worth addressing
because it's a staple of the abortion debates as well. He begins
by ridiculing a congressional hearing organized by opponents of
embryonic stem-cell research. That hearing included the testimony
of people who had been frozen embryos but were later adopted. The
idea of the hearing, writes Wright, is to suggest that these people
wouldn't be here if instead of being left frozen those embryos were
harvested for stem cells. "And of course this is true. It's also
true that if my parents had used a condom — or a little self-discipline,
for crying out loud! — in the spring of 1956, I wouldn't be
here. So I'm waiting for my call to testify in support of legislation
banning condoms and self-discipline."
If Wright's characterization of the polemical point of the hearing
is correct, then his analogy is indeed valid on this limited point.
The argument against destroying human embryos cannot be simply that
if embryos are destroyed, people who would otherwise exist will
not. But the analogy fails if the point of the hearing was to establish
that if those embryos had been destroyed, the people testifying
would have been killed. If Wright's father had been sterile, or
used contraception, or mated with a different woman, Wright would
not have existed, but he also would not have been killed as there
would never have been a Wright to kill. Robert Wright was never
a sperm, never an egg, never a sperm and an egg. But he was an embryo
back in 1956. And it would have been wrong to destroy him, in the
womb or outside it (and with or without federal funding, I might
add).
Of course, either scenario — Wright's never coming into being,
or his destruction — would have deprived us all of one of the
smartest and most interesting, if occasionally wrongheaded and supercilious,
writers around.
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