“Abortion is Murder” “Abortion stops a beating heart” “Choose life: Your Mother Did”
“Keep Abortion Legal” “My Body My Choice” “Pro-child. Pro-Family. Pro-Choice.”
Abortion rights and restrictions are among the most heated debates in today’s political arena. The pro-choice position is that women, not government, have the right to control their bodies and choose their families. The anti-abortion advocates see themselves as protecting the right of a potential person’s right to be born. Within their limited frameworks, each has their points. But this debate deserves more than bumper sticker slogans.
What does it mean to be pro-life? When does life begin? It is not as simple as the bumper stickers suggest. There are situations where denying a woman an abortion is anti-life and anti-family.
What does pro-choice mean? The question is no longer limited to whether or not a pregnancy will be carried to term. Women can now choose from dozens of her zygotes which will have a chance at personhood and join her family.
During her reproductive life, a woman will release over 200 eggs. A single male ejaculate can contain 300 million sperm. Doing the math, the potential number of different people from a single couple far exceeds the number of stars in the universe. The world has over a billion mature males who produce an average of 1,500 sperm per second. Only a minuscule number of these potential people will ever be born.
Your conception and mine denied trillions of potential people from personhood. At the moment we were conceived, there were 300+ million losers, potential people who would never be. And for the next 9 to 30 months, trillions more potential egg - sperm unions were never to be.
Would my family or the world have been better served with one of those I beat out? Would one have cured cancer? Won a Nobel, Pulitzer, or Olympic gold? I have not come close to those accomplishments.
And what about my three siblings? I love them all and the nieces and nephews they have given me. But might some of those trillions of possible siblings have been better playmates? Which one would have made enough money to give me lavish birthday presents? I’ve never been on a cruise.
My mother could not choose among her potential children. She relied on the Darwinian lottery from which I cashed a winning ticket. But today’s mothers can choose their children, not from all the possible trillions, but from dozens.
Women have always had some control over the number of children and their features. Before condoms, IUD, and birth control pills there was abstinence, rhythm, herbal remedies, and as a last resort, infanticide. By choosing her sexual partners, she had some control over her child’s features.
While designer children using the entire genome are not yet available, new technologies allow women greater choice. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) lets parents choose their children based on a which genes they carry.
Doctors flush a dozen or more eggs from the mother. In test tubes, the eggs are fertilized with the husband’s sperm. The fertilized eggs are allowed to divide three times to form 8-celled embryos. One cell is removed from each embryo and tested for genetic diseases. Embryos with genetic abnormalities are discarded. Healthy ones are implanted in the woman, hoping she will produce a healthy child in nine months. PGD has dramatically reduced the incidence of Tay-Sachs and other genetic illness that plague the American Jewish community. PDG is being used to reduce sickle cell in African Americas.
While currently used to eliminate genetically defective embryos, there is no reason PDG could not be used to select on other genetic characteristics. In fact, one couple used the procedure to produce a child they appropriately named, Adam, to use his umbilical cord stem cells to cure his sister Molly’s Fanconi anemia. Adam’s embryo was chosen over the others because it was the best genetic match for Molly’s genetic profile.
With the entire human genome now sequenced and our increasing understanding of how specific genes work, it is possible to chose embryos for eye and hair color, height, IQ, and personality tendencies. How about a left handed child? Heterosexual? Of course, these characteristics often involve a complex array of alleles and are not totally under the control of genes. Those nine months in the womb, infant nutrition, vaccinations, abuse, and culture also shape us.
But the genes are out of the bottle and we must decide how to deal with this new reality. Personhood amendments, proposed by many conservative politicians and religious leaders are especially problematic. Imagine for a moment that a fertilized human egg is given legal rights.
IUDs and most birth control pills could be banned. They work by preventing a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus. Would that be murder? Who was the killer? The woman who used the birth control or would a zygote’s lawyer try to sue the company making the birth control. Of course, we could exempt them like we do gun manufacturers.
Preimplantation genetic diagnosis and test tube fertility technics would no longer be available. Remember those 8-celled zygotes where they knock off one cell and test it for diseases? Don’t worry about the 7-cells that get implanted, they produce perfect babies. The odd thing is that when you divide those 8-cells in any configuration: 7-1; 6-2; 5-3, or even 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1, each one can become a human being. This is how we get identical twins. But it also means that under a personhood law, the one cell used to test for diseases would be protected from destruction.
When we flush women’s eggs and create test tube zygotes, many are never used once there are successful pregnancies. To date, there are 400,000 embryos frozen in storage. Current law allows the parents to destroy them. Could they be charged with murder? Will they be forced to pay the storage fees forever or should tax dollars support these frozen souls?
World wide over 4 million humans began life in a test tube, people who would never have existed if these technologies been banned. Is it ethical to require families to take the Darwinian gamble on a child with a genetic disease when they could be assured a healthy child?
Should pregnant women be forced carry all pregnancies to term? Should she be allowed to terminate the pregnancy for some reasons? Most Americas, both Democrats and Republicans, favor allowing a woman to abort a zygote created from rape. While some see this as “murder” of an innocent child, it can also be seen as denying life to a child created by love. Forcing a woman to carry a rapist’s offspring for 9 months denies her and her spouse those months to create their own offspring.
Most Americans of both parties also agree that a woman should be legally able to abort a seriously defective genetic fetus. There are genetic disorders so serious that the child will never walk, talk, or control her bowels or bladder. Not to sound hard hearted, but the reality is these offspring can easily bankrupt a family and produce no grandchildren. Is that your definition of pro life?
Which brings us to the question of “What is life?” Surprisingly, scientists aren’t sure. They agree people, bears, oak trees are alive. It is less clear that a virus is alive. Similarly, it is not clear when a fertilized cell becomes a person.
Historically and in many cultures, quickening, or when the mother can feel the fetus move, was seen as a dividing line. At one time the Catholic Church claimed male souls entered the fetus 40 days after conception with female souls entering at 80 days. Today, Catholics and conservative Protestants are pushing it back to the moment of conception.
“Life begins a birth” is a catchy bumper sticker, but the reality of how a fertilized eggs gets to a life birth is a bit more complicated. First, that fertilized egg must implant in the uterus within a few days. This does not always happen naturally. Rather than funding research and creating drugs to deny these one celled people from implanting, should we shift our public funding to create drugs to help implantation.
As noted above, after a few cell divisions the embryos can actually divide into identical twin, triples, or even five like the Canadian Dionne quintuplets. Do these people share one soul?
And there is a weird thing that happens with some fraternal twins. Sometimes the embryos merge together and produce a human with some cells containing chromosomes from one and other cells with the other’s chromosomes. Do these people have two souls?
Even when the embryos reach a fetal stage they don’t all make it to birth. No one is sure why, but compared to other mammals, humans have an above average rate of still births and spontaneous abortions. And sometimes the mother reabsorbs the fetus. It is believed that many spontaneous abortions and absorptions are due to either a genetically defective fetus or the pregnancy threatens the life of the mother due to illness or poor nutrition. I’m not sure what social policies we might implement to protect these potential people. Campaigning to spending tax dollars to increase genetically defective children will not win elections. And our current Congress is not about to expand food stamps for women, even if they are carrying a health fetus.
Modern technology added a new hurdle to the fertilized egg’s path to a live birth, genetic testing and safe medical abortions. While Americans are split on abortion for “any reason,” the vast majority approve of abortions when the pregnancy was caused by rape, the fetus has a serious genetic abnormality, or the women’s health is being compromised.
Unlike insects, reptiles, and birds, mammal offspring require months of residence inside a living female’s body. For humans, nine months is optimal. How do we balance the rights of a pregnant women with the health and rights of the fertilized egg or fetus?
The bottom line is who should make the decision to abort? The pregnant woman? State legislatures? The Federal government? The fertilized egg’s lawyer and a judge?
Bumper stickers just aren’t large enough to adequately address the discussion we need.