In case you missed it, the Alabama Supreme Court recently ruled that frozen embryos, used for In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) are legally “children” and that they are protected according to those standards. The decision was justified in fully theocratic terms, invoking the wrath of an expressly Christian God.
This immediately led to IVF providers in Alabama shutting down, and shocked horror from a lot of people who had no idea that the Religious Right would do this.
Those of us who spent time in theofascist circles were not surprised at all.
And neither will we be surprised when some red state in the near future decrees that female-controlled contraceptives (hormonal and IUD) are devices of murder and outlaw them altogether.
This is, to most normal, rational, decent people, a moral and ethical absurdity.
But, it is the inevitable result of allowing theology, rather than humanity, to direct policy.
Specifically, some highly questionable theology which is younger than I am, unsupported by the Bible, created for the purpose of giving cover to racist political goals, and which is divorced from both science and empathy.
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To start with, let’s name the religious belief:
The Religious Right believes that God injects an immortal soul into human beings at the moment that sperm and egg fuse.
[Note: this is the official line, but in practice, the Religious Right behaves as if it believes ensoulment occurs at male ejaculation into a female. That may be the subject of a different post.]
That this is clearly a religious belief should be obvious - it requires the belief in an immortal soul, a belief in a supreme being who creates them, and that this occurs at a specific moment.
For some of the issues this raises, I will defer to a separate post, other than to note that the belief in ensoulment when sperm and egg meet is a very recent belief, and was not the historic teaching of any significant branch of the Christian Church until the rise of the Religious Right in the late 1970s. For the overwhelming majority of the history of Christianity, the majority belief was that ensoulment occurred at first breath, with a minority believing it happened at “quickening” - when the movement of the fetus could be felt during the 2nd trimester.
But, at least for the last nearly 250 years, religion wasn’t supposed to be the basis of US law, right? No establishment of religion, etc. But, theofascists have taken over Alabama, and hold a majority of the US Supreme Court, so here we are.
Let’s look at this scientifically first.
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Since the existence or non-existence of an immortal soul is not something one can prove, it is not within the purvey of science, but is instead a religious belief that one either has or does not have.
What science can help with is in describing what makes us uniquely human, and in defining “personhood.”
Personhood is a very different concept from “life” - which is so nebulous as to be meaningless (and thus easy to manipulate by the Religious Right.) Human “life” exists in many forms which are clearly NOT persons.
It isn’t enough to say something about “unique DNA.” For example, as a blood donor, my unique DNA can be removed from my body and injected into another. My skin cells can be harvested and grown on a matrix for a graft either to myself or someone else. My bone marrow can be donated to save a life. One of my kidneys can be removed from me.
All of these have my unique DNA, but they are not a person. I am the person, not my DNA.
So what makes me a person. Scientifically, there are two terms which apply. First is sentience: I know I exist. I do not merely experience existence, but am aware of it.
The second is sapience: one might call this moral responsibility, knowledge of good and evil, or in a more scientific sense, the ability to plan and extrapolate. This is indeed what scientists consider a uniquely human trait, existing at a higher level than any other animal.
(I linked it above, but Thomas Suddendorf’s excellent book, The Gap, is one of the clearest things I have read on the subject of what makes us human.)
With these two things in mind, to be a person, one must, at minimum, be aware of one’s own existence. And, to be a fully adult human, one must have the ability to be responsible for one’s self.
The lines here are not bright, to say the least. We can generally see what is far to either side of the line: I am a person, my donated blood is not. But it is near the blurry line that things get more difficult, and we have to use our judgment - and our empathy - to make the difficult decisions.
Just to give an example on the issue of sapience from my legal practice: whether due to developmental disabilities, brain damage, or dementia, some people are not or become unable to care for themselves. In those cases, the court will appoint a conservator to make the necessary decisions. These can be difficult cases at the margins, and the law is an imperfect tool. However, it is a necessary one.
Next, let’s apply these ideas to embryos.
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Embryos are frozen at different stages for IVF purposes. (Something I learned researching this post.)
There is the single cell - a fertilized egg. There is the two to eight cell version, frozen a short time later. And there are the balls of about 100 cells that we call blastocysts, and take 4-6 days to develop. It is the blastocyst that leaves the fallopian tube and - if everything goes perfectly - implants in the uterine wall and develops into a fetus.
Even in natural conception and pregnancy, a significant number of fertilized eggs fail to develop into blastocysts, and a significant number of blastocysts which fail to successfully implant. There is a good bit of variance in the studies and claims as to what percentages succeed and fail - this is a difficult thing to study to say the least - but suffice it to say that with 3.7 million annual births in the US, even if it is the low end - 15% failure - that’s over a half million failed conceptions every single year. If the higher number is correct: 75% - then there are more failed fertilizations than successful ones. Keep this in mind for later, as it will create serious ethical and theological problems.
Now, let’s turn to an analysis of “personhood” for these embryos.
In all three cases, you have a bundle of undifferentiated cells. You have no nerve cells, muscle cells, bone cells, skin cells - none of these exist.
Scientifically speaking, there is no sentience here. Embryos are incapable of even the usual responses to stimuli that bacteria have.
Simply put, an embryo lacks the physical infrastructure for sentience. And, scientifically speaking, does not qualify for personhood.
It also looks like this:
This - literally - is what the Alabama Supreme Court called a “child.”
The only way you arrive at that conclusion is with that belief that ensoulment occurs when sperm fuses with egg. And that is a religious belief that should not be imposed on others, and has no place in our lawmaking.
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Equating an embryo with a child creates moral and ethical absurdity.
Let’s think through a few of these. First, if a frozen embryo is a child, what are we to do with them? There are over a million of them in the United States right now. The people who provided egg and sperm for them are likely a wide-ranging bunch: some are dead, many are old, many are done having children, some will likely use some of their embryos, but not all.
What is the end-game here? Do we force women to gestate them? And who? Maybe we can get the children or grandchildren of the judges who wrote this decision to devote their lives to popping out these “children.” And why not? Certainly the rights of these “children” outweigh any futures of these women and teens, right?
I mean, that is literally the anti-abortion argument. The woman with the uterus doesn’t matter - she should be forced to gestate, give birth, and potentially bear primary physical and economic responsibility.
Surely this is morally and ethically absurd?
This gets to the heart of the ethical problem for the anti-abortion movement. Once you accept the theological belief that ensoulment occurs at fertilization, then you end up here, with a need to force someone to gestate these embryos. If the source of the eggs is unable or dead, do you use government coercion to force a random woman to do it?
Again, what is your plan for the 1 million frozen embryos?
Do you think it is ethical to force women to gestate them? Is it ethical to take an embryo created by a couple and away from them if they won’t gestate it, and give it to someone else?
Morally and ethically absurd.
How about some other ethical problems?
If embryos are children, then by FAR the greatest cause of child death is failure to implant in the uterus.
In 2021, 9791 children died in the US. (Meaning actual children, not as defined now in Alabama.) If the lowest percentage for implantation failure is accurate, then over 50 times as many “children” die from implantation failure.
Shouldn’t we drop everything else we are doing in medical research and try to figure out how to stop this incredible bloodbath?
Does this not sound morally and ethically absurd? Do you really believe this?
Or maybe you don’t really believe embryos are children.
Likewise, if you really believe that fertilized eggs have immortal souls, then you must believe that between heaven and hell, 3 in every 20 people you meet will have never implanted in a uterus, but “died” and went to the afterlife having never gotten past 100 cells.
Do you really believe that? And if the numbers are the higher estimate, more than half of the people you meet in heaven would never have “lived” as a sentient being. Really?
[Actually, come to think of it, if you believe like an old-school Calvinist that unbaptized infants go to hell, then hell is mostly populated by people who were never, technically speaking, born. If you believe that unbaptized infants and children under the age of responsibility go to heaven, then even with the lower numbers, heaven is almost certainly filled mostly with people who were never actually born. And if they go to heaven, isn’t aborting them ALL the compassionate thing, rather than risk they make choices that send them to hell?]
I mean, come on! This is so far into absurdity it almost doesn’t warrant comment!
This also raises ethical issues which many of us who left fundamentalism have been warning about. If an embryo has a soul, then that justifies complete control of pregnant - or potentially pregnant women. Heaven forbid she might do something that might theoretically lessen her chances of carrying a child to term. Everything from eating sushi to exercising.
Is full-on policing of pregnant women, and mass incarceration of those who aren’t perfect enough in their behavior where we want to go with this?
That’s morally and ethically absurd.
But what actually would prevent more of these deaths? Contraception works primarily by preventing ovulation, with a possible (the evidence is less than convincing) secondary effect of preventing implantation. Because so many “natural” fertilized eggs fail to implant, taking contraception would actually prevent a LOT of “deaths” by preventing ovulation. In raw numbers, there would be fewer dead “children” if every woman was constantly on contraception and never tried to conceive.
Which is obviously a morally and ethically absurd position to take.
In reality, we accept the risk of failed pregnancies as a cost of successful ones, and feel no moral guilt about it. But if those really were immortal souls, our lack of concern is a problem, yes?
Here is another one: 2 percent of all births in the US are IVF. Even such conservatives as former vice president Mike Pence has an IVF-conceived child. It is one of the most effective means of treating infertility and allowing otherwise infertile couples to have children. If you shut this down, you actually lower the number of children - real, actual children - that are born to people who desire them.
Some Republicans are already backpedaling and looking to create an IVF exception, but they are finding that this in itself creates another moral and ethical issue.
What IS the moral difference between an embryo in a freezer and one in a fallopian tube or uterus?
There is none.
So, if you actually believe in ensoulment at fertilization, you can’t pick and choose. Even if that leads to results that are morally and ethically absurd in the real world.
If you grant the exception - just like if you grant the exceptions for rape and incest to abortion - you lose the game. And you lose because you admit that your moral high horse is just an excuse for something else. I’ll get to that.
So, maybe you decide to try some more consistent exceptions so that you can keep, say, IVF and female-controlled contraception. But then, that leads to the question of when that ensoulment occurs. Once you go down that road, you are back to where we used to be: quickening, or alternate, first breath. (Or, at least theoretically, some scientific sentience line we have yet to actually discover.)
And then you start to look at the very small numbers of later abortions, which happen, not because women change their mind partway through a pregnancy, but because of serious issues, from fetal anomaly to health complications. Nobody has having a late abortion for shits and giggles. Nobody.
You can see that the more you actually take reality and humanity into account, the closer you get to keeping the law generally out of reproductive decisions. Women and their (actual, born) children do better when women have choices about reproduction. And that includes contraception, IVF, and, yes, abortion.
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We know what this is really about, though, and it isn’t “the children.”
The anti-abortion lobby lies. It lies constantly and about everything. Everything from church history, the Bible, and legal history to science. It needs these lies to sustain the movement and it needs the lies to prevent its followers from embracing a truly holistic approach to abortion that would feature universal access to contraception, scientifically accurate sex education, and consent-based relationship education.
The real issue for the Religious Right and the anti-abortion lobby is that women have sex for pleasure and other reasons, rather than solely to create babies for a man who, for all practical purposes, owns them.
This is nothing new. Traditionally and for many today, pregnancy is seen as a necessary punishment for women who have sex without being married to and controlled by a man. Without that punishment, it is much harder to “keep women in line.” Both abortion and contraception give women other options, and thus loosen male control.
This is also about how right wingers view the role of women, and their reason for existence in the world. Women are to breed, not think. They are to create and care for the offspring of the men who own women for that purpose. And they are to be controlled by men, using the power of the state if necessary.
It is beyond the scope of this post, but this belief is essentially a projection like everything else the Right Wing says and does. Biologically, the default for life is female. It is males who exist in biological terms solely for reproduction, for the creation and preservation of genetic diversity. This doesn’t mean men are unnecessary or irrelevant in human society - we are social animals, and nobody is truly unnecessary or irrelevant.
By giving embryos souls and full rights, it means taking rights away from actual sentient and sapient beings: women. Losing the right to decide whether to use your body to gestate is significant. Being forced to risk life and health, as is already happening in red states, is significant.
At the heart of it all is the belief that women exist to gestate, and that all other rights she may have are meaningless compared to that.
And that is how you take the idea of the Image of God - an immortal soul - and turn it into a weapon that dehumanizes women, and end up in a place of moral and ethical absurdity.
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