Embryo Research

Well, then. I was getting ready to post about this article on embryonic research and I noticed that it went well with this post Amanda at Pandagon put up a bit ago. Nice timing. Anyway, the article notes the attempt to define the beginning of human life as contraception using science:

“To be a complete human organism,” they write, “an entity must possess a developmental program (including both its DNA and epigenetic factors) oriented toward developing a brain and central nervous system.” The program begins at conception; therefore, so does personhood.

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George and Tollefsen reason that the embryo is fully human and its life therefore inviolable, because its program is self-contained. “Nothing extrinsic to the developing organism itself acts on it to produce a new character or new direction of growth,” they write. The embryo has all the “structures necessary for providing the new individual with a suitable environment and adequate nutrition.” It can “get itself to the uterus,” “burrow” into the uterine wall and begin “taking in nourishment” from “a congenial environment.”

Wow, they just said that the mother isn’t really necessary. Ok, when I said science I might have been stretching the meaning as Saletan notes:

Nobody with a womb would describe pregnancy this way. The “congenial environment” is a woman. The embryo doesn’t “get itself” around her like some Horatio Alger hero. Her body sustains it, guides it and affects its direction of growth. Mother and child are a system.

While quoting from embryology textbooks, the authors omit passages that confound their bootstrap theory. One such passage reports that “the early embryo and the female reproductive tract influence one another” as the embryo is “being transported” to the uterus. Another observes that “implantation requires a high degree of preparation and coordination by both the embryo and the endometrium” — preparation that begins, on the womb’s part, well before conception. Maternal factors don’t just facilitate the embryo’s program; they direct it. Maternal RNA guides the embryo’s early organization. Later, factors in the womb apparently influence traits like sexual orientation.

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The program’s collective nature doesn’t discredit individual rights. But it does complicate the authors’ task. They have to show that the embryo is an individual, not just a program. Here, again, science defies them. They write that the embryo’s cells “function together to develop into a single, more mature member of the human species.” Not quite. In one of every 300 cases, the embryo splits to become two or more people, at least one of whom wasn’t a distinct organism at conception. And in every case, part of the embryo becomes placenta, nurturing the other part and passing away. The embryo, too, is collective.

The song and dance with science here is the religious right’s way to try to get contraception outlawed. If they can convince people that embryos are human, then they’re half the way there. In fact most of the way and if they can use science language to help they will, just as they use the language of science to argue for intelligent design (a disguise for creationism–ie religion). The fact that their science is bad might not matter, because it’s just a smokescreen.

And this is the way they’ll work, because as Amanda’s post notes, they don’t dare try the direct approach to outlawing contraception since it’s almost universally approved right now. The backlash would demolish them, so they try to work the language.