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TechnoratiDoes making babies make sense?
Why so many people find it difficult to see humanity in a developing foetus.
In December of 2005 an op-ed piece by
sociologist Dalton Conley appeared in the New
York Times, stating that “most Americans... see a fetus as an
individual under construction.” This widespread vision of the embryo and fetus
as “under construction” is the key to understanding why good people may find
pro-life arguments to be absurd or otherwise non-rational, eg, religious,
particularly with regard to embryonic stem cell research.
The construction idea also may explain how Republican presidential candidate John McCain has been able to support both the right to life from the moment of conception and embryonic stem cell research.
Just think of something being constructed (fabricated, assembled, composed, sculpted – in short, made), such as a house, or a scholarly article – or take a car on an assembly line. When is a car first there? At what point in the assembly line would we first say, “There’s a car”? Some of us would no doubt go with appearance, saying that there is a car as soon as the body is fairly complete (in analogy to the fetus at 10 weeks or so). I suppose that most of us would look for something functional. We would say that there is a car only after a motor is in place (in analogy to quickening). Others might wait for the wheels (in analogy to viability) or even the windshield wipers (so that it’s viable even in the rain). And a few might say, “It’s not a car until it rolls out onto the street” (in analogy to birth). There would be many differing opinions.
However, one thing upon which we’ll probably all agree is this: Nobody is going to say that the car is there at the very beginning of the assembly line, when the first screw or rivet is put in or when two pieces of metal are first welded together. (You can see how little I know about car manufacturing.) Two pieces of metal fastened together don’t match up to anybody’s idea of a car.
I think that this is exactly the way that many people see the embryo, like the car-to-be at the very beginning of the construction process. In the first stages of construction you don’t have a house, you don’t have a car, you don’t have a human individual yet. You don’t ever have what you’re making when you’ve just started making it. This does not mean that our “constructionist” friends are anti-life. They may believe that a baby should have absolute protection once it has been fully fabricated. But until that point, for them, abortion just isn’t murder.
What happens when a constructionist hears a pro-lifer argue that a human embryo has the same right to life as any other human being? Journalist Michael Kinsley, writing in the Washington Post, expressed his utter bewilderment: “I cannot share, or even fathom, [the pro-life] conviction that a microscopic dot – as oblivious as a rock, more primitive than a worm – has the same rights as anyone reading this article.”
There’s a deep truth at the base of Kinsley's puzzlement. Nothing can be a certain kind of thing until it possesses the form of that kind of thing, and the form of a thing under construction just plain isn’t there at the beginning of the construction process. It isn’t there because that form is being gradually imposed from the outside and the persons or forces doing the construction have not yet been able to shape the raw material into what it will eventually be.
There is a special relevance of the construction idea to the embryonic stem cell debate. Conley admits there can be a peculiar, lesser sort of dignity even in a work-in-progress. For example, if we thought God were engaged in fabricating a new Eve, out of a bone and a breath, we wouldn't want to destroy His work-in-progress, simply out of respect for Him. Again, many of us would think a Corvette-To-Be pretty special even on the assembly line, something not lightly to be destroyed, because it's on the way to becoming something that we really care about. But if the auto factory shuts down early on, those two pieces of joined metal on the assembly line are not "to be" anything; they're just recyclable waste. Likewise, an embryo conceived outside the womb – with no plans to implant it so that it could be born – is not on its way "to be" anything. Thus it has little or no work-in-progress dignity, and work-in-progress type dignity is all that it can ever have for Conley and those who agree with his construction model of gestation.
So there is a reason that people like John McCain, and some others who are strongly opposed to abortion, even in early pregnancy, could feel free to vote for embryonic stem cell research funding. They could think that an intrauterine fetus or embryo is a great divine or human work in progress, and thus shouldn’t be aborted, even when just recently conceived, but only because it is under construction. Since the thousands of frozen, test-tube-generated embryos that scientists want to use for experiments are not under construction, are just scrap left over from IVF treatments, they can be recycled without a qualm.
Development as an alternative to construction
Despite the great explanatory power of Conley’s construction metaphor for an understanding of contemporary life-issue debates, it is radically misleading concerning the nature of gestation. It is in fact not true that the bodies of living creatures are constructed, by God or by anyone else. There is no outside builder or maker. Life is not made. Life develops.
In construction, the form defining the entity being built arrives only slowly, as it is added from the outside. In development, the form defining the growing life (that which a major Christian tradition calls its “soul”) is within it from the beginning. If Corvette production is cancelled, the initial two pieces of metal stuck together can become the starting point for something else, perhaps another kind of car, or maybe a washing machine. But even if you take a human embryo out of the womb, you can never get it to develop into a puppy or a guppy.
Living organisms are not formed or defined from the outside. They define and form themselves. The form or nature of a living being is already there from the beginning, in its activated genes, and that form begins to manifest itself from the very first moment of its existence, in self-directed epigenetic interaction with its environment. Embryos don’t need to be molded into a type of being. They already are a definite kind of being.
This idea of development – as the continual presence but gradual appearance of a being – lies deep within us. Here is a non-biological example of development. Suppose that we are back in the pre-digital photo days and you have a Polaroid camera and you have taken a picture that you think is unique and valuable – let’s say a picture of a jaguar darting out from a Mexican jungle. The jaguar has now disappeared, and so you are never going to get that picture again in your life, and you really care about it. (I am trying to make this example parallel to a human being, for we say that every human being is uniquely valuable.) You pull the tab out and as you are waiting for it to develop, I grab it away from you and rip it open, thus destroying it. When you get really angry at me, I just say blithely, “You’re crazy. That was just a brown smudge. I cannot fathom why anyone would care about brown smudges.” Wouldn’t you think that I were the insane one? Your photo was already there. We just couldn’t see it yet.
Why do we sometimes find the constructionist view plausible, while at other times the more accurate developmental view seems to make more sense? The constructionist view is intuitively appealing, I think, whenever the future is shut out of our minds, even if we are using the scientifically correct term “development.” Whenever the embryo or fetus is described in terms simply of its current appearance, it is easy to fall into constructionism. For example, if a snapshot is taken in which an embryo looks like just a ball of cells, its dynamic self-direction is obscured. It seems inert. Since an entity that had merely embryonic characteristics as its natural end state would indeed not qualify as a human being, it is easy to imagine that the entity in the snapshot is not human. Scientific knowledge of its inner activity may not be enough to overcome this impression, for it is hard to recognize a form still hidden from view.
However, when we look backwards in time or otherwise have in mind a living entity’s final concrete form, development becomes intuitively compelling. Knowing that the developing Polaroid picture would have been of a jaguar helped us to see that calling it a “brown smudge” was inadequate. If we somehow had an old photo taken of our friend Jim just after he had been conceived, and was thus just a little ball, we'd have no trouble saying, "Look, Jim. That's you!" Thus the most arresting way to put the developmental case against embryo-destructive research would be something like this: “Each of your friends was once an embryo. Each embryo destroyed could one day have been your friend.”
Deconstruction and the disabled
The construction vs development clash may also help us to clarify our mutual misunderstandings regarding euthanasia. If a Corvette is gradually deconstructed (dismantled), it eventually ceases to merit the appellation “car”. If you were given a disassembled Corvette body, without the motor or wheels, would you feel that you had been given a “car”? What if you got only a chunk of the frame? True, Corvette-lovers might still have a certain reverence for that body, or even for a piece of the frame, because of what it used to be part of, so that wantonly trashing it (for no good purpose) could still seem to them wrong. But it wouldn’t seem nearly as bad as destroying a whole car. (Remember, there’s nothing wrong with this thinking with regard to artificial creations like cars. Once the pieces necessary to form a car are gone, that form itself is gone and so the car is truly gone.)
Life, however, is different. The form (nature, design) of a living creature both precedes and perdures independently of its appearance and function. That activated form is imbedded within a living being’s every part and every cell (in its active DNA). As long as a disabled creature remains anything – that is, as long as it holds itself together in some way, rather than just becoming a collection of non-integrated objects – that is, as long as it remains alive – it remains what it always was from the beginning of its development.
Indeed, our photo analogy fails fully to capture the nature of life. A photo does not hold itself together. If you scratch it after it has been developed, it won’t even try to repair itself. Like a constructed entity, it is merely an assemblage of parts, without a continuing inner force maintaining its form. Since a living creature is not only an assemblage of parts, it actually cannot be merely constructed. Both ancient and modern constructionists switch (and have to switch) to the developmental understanding at some point during gestation, or soon thereafter, in order to account for the fact that living human beings do have this active inner unifying form, until the day they die.
A deconstructionist might forget this truth and claim misleadingly that someone in a so-called “persistent vegetative state” is no longer a human being, having lost forever what we think special about our species. But in point of fact such a person never loses the unifying force that strives to express her humanity, until the moment she dies. Every part of her wasted body, even her very genes, actively, though in vain, strives to repair her injuries and to express her natural reason, will, and connection to those whom she has loved. She never becomes something else, such as a vegetable. That’s why her condition is tragic, because she has a human nature that is utterly frustrated. We don’t find real vegetables tragic (“Poor little heads of lettuce. Look how they’re just vegetating!”) because they are able to exhibit their inner design or nature.
As a result of accident or of age, many of us will become no longer capable (in this world) of expressing well, or expressing at all, the speech, reason, choice, and love for which we remain formed. Our humanity will have once more become partially hidden, as it was when we had just been conceived, but it will still be there.
Richard Stith J.D.(Yale), Ph.D.(Yale), teaches at Valparaiso University School of Law (Indiana, U.S.A.). Email: . A longer version of this article appeared as "Construction, Development, and Revelopment" in XVII LIFE AND LEARNING 243-255(2008), edited by Joseph Koterski, SJ.
Randal, I fail to follow your argument. What was it that Ms. O’Hagen said that prompted your reconstruction of her argument?
I assume you do not believe abortion is the taking of an innocent human person’s life, or else you do and yet you don’t believe it’s murder. Which do you believe?
David, you’re right. It’s an old argument. If you were in a fertility farm (let’s say the kind that is likely to evolve a hundred years from now) and the clinic had a raging chemical fire, and you only had time to save a single baby in a crib vs. 100 3-month old fetuses in a bank of artificial wombs, which would you choose to save? What criteria would you employ to make the judgment?
I’m sure you would like to remove all the “irrelevant” variables from the thought experiment in order to arrive at something definitive, but I submit to you that no one can truthfully answer such a question, because it’s too abstract to have an answer that is both valid and common sensical.
Personally, I would have no hesitation in saving the infant, first, but then I could hear the infant crying. I would have no confidence that the cannister of embryos preserved them in safety in the midst of a fire, I would have no confidence that these embryos could be revived without grave and irreparable damage even if the fire had not intervened, and I would have no confidence that they could be given a chance at life even if these embryos could be saved.
None of the above relates in any way whatever to my belief that these embryos have a human soul and are worthy of my protection. Then, when I stand before them at the gates of heaven, I will explain why I prefered to save one infant, rather than to risk my life to save them, knowing that the infant would then perish in a terrible and painful death.
I’m going to make an old argument. My premise is that this is an academic discussion when it comes to fertilized eggs. You can argue, with great logic, that a fertilized egg is a human being but I would argue that you don’t really believe it. I’m sure this won’t be new to you but here goes.
There is a fire in a fertility clinic. You have two options. You can save either a frozen canister with 100 embryos or you can save a 6 month old baby. Which do you choose? One or the other.
Margaret O’Hagen’s logic is defective. The connectivity between premise and conclusion is too strung out. The following steps, or something similar, need to be inserted to make sense of the “therefore.”
1. Premise: Society should be encouraged to decide in favour of life.
2. Therefore, society should criminalize the taking of human life.
3. Premise: Criminalized taking of life is murder.
4. Premise: At any stage, abortion is taking of human life.
5. Taken together, 2, 3, and 4 yield “therefore, at any stage, abortion is murder.”
If you accept the argument without qualification, and have in mind “all takings of human life” you accept that the death penalty and the bombings such as those by the U.S.-led coalition against Iraq were also murder. I would reject Premise 3, on the ground that murder as traditionally defined implies intention to kill, as distinct from killing by negligence, which is also criminalized in Canada. There are other questions and challenges to the different steps in the argument.
Surely, society should be encouraged to decide in favour of life - and therefore, at any stage abortion is murder
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Then again, maybe people knows that, that words have power in itself. In this third hypothesis, the majority would be “constructionists” not to explain the natural process how humans are made, but to impose over nature their own moral options and needs. I called the developing idea as more friendlier to churches position, but that’s not exactly right. For instance, in the article, it is stressed a continuity of the human person through the presence of their genetic material, to attack concepts like stem cell research and Euthanasia, and sub-plotted, to attack any intervention since conception until death. The side-effect of this concept is to downplay parent’s role, by raising fetus autonomy and self-direction. It allows doubts if true twins shouldn’t be considered the same person instead of different people. It also opens the door to unwanted concepts like fetus being seen as parasites growing inside people, since they are autonomous in self-development, using mother resources. If people are defined since conception, then how can we justify education? Pedagogical punishment? Special cares for the pregnant? Church guidance? The constructionist view would have the advantage of bringing parents and society’s actions into the equation of person formation, turning them co-responsible. While being near the true nature of the process, the word “developing” wouldn’t convey as much urgency to it nor show what parents should do, and so their preference for the “construction” word instead.
Enough to say, the same kind of “imposition” game can be played by the word “development” too.
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Then, perhaps Conley refers to what Americans generally answer when pressed to clarify how they think fetus grow to be babies. Not to expect a perfect scientific culture from the average citizen, the answers would reflect the language and concepts they master. In a Industrial society dominated by manufacturing processes, its language would be a natural candidate to try explanations. If that’s was the case, I think risky to explain people’s moral decisions based on forced answers in a language it wouldn’t be theirs. They can offer it as a convenient explanation to why they think how they think, but it is not the primordial reason why they think that.
For the author purposes, this “translation” might be ideal because words have power rooted in other common practices, which highlight moral connections through logic, bypassing our usual doubts over how we should opinion or behave, and imposing what we should do. The author plays with the contradiction of defending stem cell research while being pro-life if we believe in “developing” instead of “constructing”. I’m not sure if is attacking that kind of research or simply having fun in appointing contradictions in people’s opinions but the implicit argument continues like this: if good people don’t see contradiction because they are “constructionists”, then what they should do if science shows the “development” picture to be a more correct approach to the case?…
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About this article, what puzzles me most is not that the people’s majority still thinks in terms of making/constructing babies, but why they don’t see it differently from the start. After all, the idea of a master plan inside the first cells is more than a century old, the developing idea that implies for the fetus likewise, and seeing how the author, Richard Stith, explores it to pave the way to concepts dearest to the churches, I would risk to say the ground was more fertile to the “developing” embryo than the “constructed” one. Instead, the author report us that the majority of Americans still talks about babies “em construction”. Why is that so? If science language favors a concept more “friendly” to the moral backbone of a country, why is it not more widespread?
I can think of several hypothesis to explain this. One is simply to distrust Conley statement. Here in Portugal, “making babies” is a cute term used to name sex only. Once conception happens, “they” “grow” (in the womb) and people say they are pregnant or are going to have a baby. The language is different from the one we used to describe the appearance of manufactured objects or land projects… and why shouldn’t be so? We don’t want to be confused with vulgar things. I would be surprised if other peoples or cultures doesn’t do the same, particularly when the language goes to the point of supporting a third gender for things ("it"; Portuguese doesn’t have it).
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A further thought on the construction and development models, which is a major contribution to the abortion debate:
I believe it’s crucial to persuading women that abortion is always a serious ethical issue, to help them to understand abortion does not restore the pre-pregancy status quo. The pro-choice approach that says “have an abortion and it’s as though the pregnancy never existed, everything’s back to normal” is not true, either as objective reality - an embryo or fetus in fact existed - or usually from the woman’s perspective - she doesn’t feel or believe no new life was present.
The construction model supports the idea that the pre-pregancy status quo can be restored by abortion. You are building a house, change your mind and knock it down, you have restored your vacant block of land to its original state.
In contrast, under a development model if you cut down the naturally occuring young trees on that land their potential is lost forever - the land cannot be restored to its original state, because that state included the potential of those trees which are now lost. Replacement trees are possible, but to say replacement children are possible (as often happens in abortion - “I’ll have a baby later") is to make children fungible or exchangeable without loss, and to move towards seeing them as possessions, rather than unique human beings. One other example of the latter is prenatal screening and discarding or aborting “defective” embryos or fetuses - the “We’ll try again and hope for better luck next time” approach.
The differences in the ethical outcomes from the two models of what’s involved in abortion should help us to recognize the complexity of the debate and, consequently, the wisdom with which we need to engage in it, if we are to persuade individual women not to choose abortion - and ethically persuasion is far preferable to compulsion.
First, thanks to the author for a terrific article. Your insights will be most helpful in debates on blogs. Secondly thanks also to the input from Dr.Margaret Somerville, ethicist from Canada. As usual, some great ideas to think about.
Thanks to Margo Somerville for her valuable additional observation about the application of the act/omission distinction.
Thanks again to Mercatornet for Richard Stich’s article. I was led to read his article, “Location and Life: How Stenberg v. Carhart Undercut Roe v. Wade,” 9 William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law 255 (2003), which has many interesting observations about Roe v. Wade and its aftermath. But his treatment of construction vs. development is best expressed in this Mercatornet article with his polaroid analogy. This insight has legs and I predict it will have an important influence on future debate and legal enactments and decision-making.
“Construction” also has a particular appeal a modernist mindset, the same mindset that--at its extreme--can lead to materialism and scientism. “Development,” on the other hand, with its holistic, organic connotations, has a stronger appeal within the postmodern paradigm from which more and more people are operating.
Thank you for this superb article.
This is article provides crucial insights about the roots of our different views on abortion, human embryo stem cell research and euthanasia. It shows how the model or framework we use to view our conduct with respect to an embryo, fetus or person, and the language, metaphors and analogies we use to describe that conduct, can radically alter our conclusions about what our ethical obligations are and whether or not our conduct is ethical.
A major difference between a “construction model” and a “development model” is the latter evokes an ethics of potentiality, the former does not.
Under a construction model, we can choose to stop constructing (abortion) or to deconstruct (euthanasia)and consider that ethical. Pro-choice is correctly named - choice is central to this view.
The development model requires that we respect the innate potentiality of the embryo, fetus or person, their “capacity to become”, keeping in mind that we are all in the process of becoming from conception to natural death. That requires us not act to with a primary intention to destroy that potential. (Sometimes, it might be destroyed as a secondary consequence of a justified act.) This is a pro-life view, because that is what results.
The moral intuitions evoked by each model - seeing our conduct as choosing not to construct, compared with as the destruction of human potential - are also radically different. We are much more likely to see the latter as wrong and unethical than the former, which might be tied to an act omission distinction.
Under the construction model we can decide not to continue to construct - an omission. Under the development model we can see ourselves as destroying potentiality - an act. In general, humans have stronger moral intuitions against unethical acts than omissions, a difference reflected in many legal systems which are much more likely to impose liability for acts than for omissions.
Thank you for this excellent articulation. In my simplicity of thought I have started at the end and worked backward, requiring to know when was the only time the person was not a life. The only thing that seems reasonable to me is:
before conception. Sometimes in order to perceive what something is, we have to examine what something is not. For example, we can know what the will of God is, by knowing what the will of God is not. He is not willing that any should perish, but that all might come to repentence.....for God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosover believes in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life. Then to further apply this kind of thought, we examine when something is, by determining when something is not. It is crystal clear. The only time there is no life, is before conception. Thank you again.
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