Robert Wright’s Secret Past
He used to be an embryo.

July 19, 2001 8:55 a.m.

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.