Test Tube Morality Out of This World

The birth of the British test-tube baby, Louise Brown, has vividly underscored one most important question which on many levels puzzles men and women today: What does it mean to be human? The long road of research that led to Louise Brown’s laboratory conception, implantation in the womb, and eventual birth is strewn with necessarily blind tinkering at life’s beginnings, deliberately destroyed embryos (the Del Zio baby was of those), technical intervention in the marital act, and only the researchers know what other moral horrors.

The strictly traditional Christian answer to this question contains multiple elements (creation by God, a spiritual soul, our original ancestors Adam and Eve, salvation by Jesus, destiny for Heaven, sin, grace). But the starting-point of that answer sets it quite apart: it defines what is human in terms of the divine. Within the scope of this answer, therefore, all human life in whatever form is sacrosanct; hence, the researchers and all engaged with them would be morally guilty of, at the least, multiple infanticide, all embryos presumably being human once the sperm cell penetrates to the center of the ovum and fertilization begins.

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Malachi B. Martin

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The birth of the British test-tube baby, Louise Brown, has vividly underscored one most important question which on many levels puzzles men and women today: What does it mean to be human? The long road of research that led to Louise Brown’s laboratory conception, implantation in the womb, and eventual birth is strewn with necessarily blind tinkering at life’s beginnings, deliberately destroyed embryos (the Del Zio baby was of those), technical intervention in the marital act, and only the researchers know what other moral horrors.

The strictly traditional Christian answer to this question contains multiple elements (creation by God, a spiritual soul, our original ancestors Adam and Eve, salvation by Jesus, destiny for Heaven, sin, grace). But the starting-point of that answer sets it quite apart: it defines what is human in terms of the divine. Within the scope of this answer, therefore, all human life in whatever form is sacrosanct; hence, the researchers and all engaged with them would be morally guilty of, at the least, multiple infanticide, all embryos presumably being human once the sperm cell penetrates to the center of the ovum and fertilization begins.