NR alum Robert VerBruggen considers himself a pro-lifer, but believes that human embryos in early stages of development do not have a right to life. He has propounded this view in three recent issues of NR, first in an article and then in responses to letters from pro-lifers who disagree with him.

VerBruggen does not follow either of the two most common paths of those seeking to deny the right to life to human beings in the embryonic stage. He does not seek to demonstrate that human embryos are anything other than living human organisms, which would require disputing well-established science. And he does not mount any direct argument that some living human organisms do not qualify as “persons” with rights.

Instead, he makes an indirect argument to the same effect:

If an unimplanted embryo is a human life worth protecting, this has ramifications far beyond IUDs. It also brings to our attention the fact that many pregnancies end naturally when the embryo fails to implant, and women don’t even notice. Estimates vary widely, but this likely happens hundreds of thousands to millions of times every year in the U.S. (For comparison, there are about 35,000 motor-vehicle fatalities and 600,000 cancer deaths per year.) Research into this phenomenon is still in its early stages, but at least part of the story seems to be that women’s bodies are designed to destroy embryos with genetic abnormalities, in a sort of natural eugenics, and sometimes this process is miscalibrated and healthy embryos are destroyed too.
It’s not enough to refrain from killing human beings; we also need to prevent natural death whenever we can, even at considerable expense, and even if the person has a genetic disorder. This is the approach we take not only after birth, but also (abortion, horrifyingly, aside) with fetuses at later stages of development. A serious attempt to minimize these deaths could include drugs to reduce the risk of implantation failure, tests to make sure women’s embryo-destroying apparatuses are not overly sensitive before they try to conceive, or even, eventually, pre-screening eggs and sperm for abnormalities and managing the fertilization process in artificial wombs. This conclusion—a pro-life war on natural childbearing—is absurd enough to call into serious question the premise that unimplanted embryos must be protected.

I do not think VerBruggen’s argument is sound.

He raises four possible ways of preventing embryonic death. Items two and three I think we can dismiss out of hand. The pro-life position does not entail — and few pro-lifers hold it to entail — any strong moral obligation to avoid conceiving children at a heightened risk of dying early. Almost everyone in our society recognizes that three-year-olds have a right not to be killed, and almost everyone thinks that we should go to considerable effort to keep three-year-olds from dying from disease, but that does not mean that we have a similarly strong obligation first to determine which couples might conceive a child who would be more likely to die of an early-childhood disease and next to prevent these couples from conceiving. We can reject these courses of action, then, without positing that embryos have no right to life.

As for drugs to increase the likelihood that an embryo will implant in the womb: Well, tell me more about these drugs. What are their side effects? What are their costs? Are we anywhere close to having them? There might be circumstances — ones that right now sound like the stuff of science fiction — in which pro-life women might consider it morally obligatory to take such drugs. (The bar for requiring it of anyone would be higher.) We are, of course, also a long way off from having artificial wombs that improve the chances for human embryos to grow. In that case, too, there would be a set of prudential and principled considerations to think through before deciding whether the use of these artificial wombs should be tolerated, endorsed, condemned, or prohibited.

In none of our thinking about any of these highly hypothetical questions would we need to resort to the premise that embryonic human lives are not real lives, or that they lack the basic dignity, worth, and right not to be deliberately killed or to have their interests wholly ignored that other human beings possess. If we rejected some course of action as absurd, it would not be because it is absurd to concern ourselves with embryonic lives but because that course of action involved incurring absurd costs, absurdly ignoring other goods, and so forth — the same things we consider when deciding what we should do to save other lives.

As VerBruggen understands perfectly well, we may fail to try to save someone’s life for a much wider range of reasons than we may kill someone. For his argument to work, he needs our reasons for trying to save someone’s life, or not trying, to turn on the age or stage of development of that someone. But he has not offered any ground for thinking that it should turn on those things.