Embryonic Personhood and Revelatory Love

Or, How We Become Human

I don’t know how to talk to people who would count an embryo as a person. If I had no need of it, I would just as soon scrape it off my cutting board along with the red pepper innards and cucumber skins that no one wants. I’m grateful my vegetables don’t need to be stored at -325 degrees Fahrenheit to stay fresh, nor have either one of my children, human creatures that they are.

My beloved told me recently that I can be difficult to argue with because I often fail to see all sides. To which I replied: I see all relevant sides and do not feel obliged to engage with idiotic viewpoints.

Perhaps she has a fair point. Still, although I can smile at and talk about the weather with and even have fond feelings for a person who has such a view, I cannot pretend to think that they are not also insane. I might regard them in the same way I would someone tripping on acid or mushrooms, who hallucinates and is wholly detached from reality. Like that.

Although I am technically a political scientist, I am not a very good one, and so it won’t surprise anyone to know that I don’t have much to say about the political implications of the AL ruling. I’ll leave that to far smarter friends and colleagues, like Jonathan Weiler, whose piece on this can be read here. But I hope to say a few things that might help us think more clearly about the moral and ethical implications of this ruling. Not moral in the sense of is it a “good” versus a “bad” decision (it’s definitely bad, friends), but moral in the sense of what such a view that went into that decision might mean for our shared inter-personal understandings of what, exactly, it means to be human.

The concerns in the Alabama case are significant and complex on both sides, and I do not mean to be flip. Certainly, people who have spent an enormous amount of money, time, physical labor and emotional investment in IVF treatments do not consider an embryo to be a mere anything, nor should they, and they are entitled to fair compensatory damages if such property is lost or destroyed when in the hands of people and institutions entrusted to look after it. I have witnessed many friends go through the trials and tribulations of IVF, and well understand the incredible loss each couple in the AL case must have felt upon hearing the news that a dream of a life imagined was, at least for now, dead and their sizeable investment lost. But a dream dying is not the same thing as a person dying, and if you are a person (one not cryogenically frozen, I mean, but out here among the non-frozen people living with consciousness, sentience, rational thought and recognition as a human by other humans) who believes deep in your heart that a lab where embryos are stored should be treated in the same way that we should treat a day care facility, then I have two responses.

The first is to call BULLSHIT and say, bet you don’t! I bet you don’t honestly believe that, but rather are invested in an entirely different political project that flies under the banner of God and which takes as its starting place the absolute control of women’s bodies and reproductive life all the way down to conception (you can do it this way, but not that way; naturally, sans technology; please keep an actual penis involved at all times, etc.). Bet the fact that we can now craft families entirely without men is frightening to you and makes you feel angry at the loss of control and your own status as heterosexual and/or male, so you prefer to keep the focus on babies and children to appear more virtuous and less menacing. Bet if are a woman and you had more hobbies, freedom or pleasure in your own life this wouldn’t even hit your radar, but that’s another matter entirely. My second response, if you are a person who regards an embryo in roughly the same way as you would a human child is to simply step back from any meaningful conversation, as I no longer believe it is possible with you. As offended as you are by the idea that an embryo has no intrinsic value to me and very little to do with God, I cannot fathom that you are utterly incapable of placing any limits whatsoever on what does and does not get counted in the human family, which, it may shock you to know, I also believe was created in God’s image. I feel frightened when talking to someone who is so deeply confused about some key moral concepts that go to the heart of what it means to be counted in the human family, the same way I might feel when talking to a person capable of murder, say, as I take such people to be fundamentally out of touch with what it is to be counted in that family, and so now I am wondering if I have made the error where you are concerned. I might expect an alien, for example, to not fully grasp the parameters of human life on earth, at least not right away, but not another creature I call fellow human. That is part of what puts us in that category to begin with, our shared understanding of and what we are and why we belong. Isn’t it?

The suggestion that embryos are “cryogenetically preserved human beings,” is entirely too outrageous for any sane person to take seriously. It is, to be clear, a view so idiotic that we could not ever have imagined needing to engage it. And, yet.

To say that it is precisely because embryos must be frozen at temperatures so cold that it would practically burn a hand right off a person in order to be kept alive should be enough to rule it out from being understood as a person. But, apparently, it isn’t. And so I am obliged to say more.

Firstly, a human isn’t a human because they are in possession of certain faculties, abilities, virtues or even sentience. About that, the person on the side of embryonic personhood and I agree. When we consider the many rights and protections we typically think are properly accorded to persons, irrespective of various other aspects of their identity (race, nationality, gender identity, etc.), we do not seriously believe it is because people have rationality or can feel pain that they are owed anything at all. Indeed, most of us discount any kind of rationalism that would serve as the basis for a grounding of human rights, and do not believe that an ability to engage in logic and reason is what makes one human, in the first place. There are, of course, countless and varied examples of not fully rational beings we count as human, and some of them, like those with severe learning impairments and disabilities, are not even coming to it, like otherwise healthy infants, or have ever had it, like those stricken with Alzheimer’s or dementia. Folks in a catatonic or comatose state, who may not feel pain in an ordinary way, are still counted as human, even if their grasp on life is somewhat tenuous and if they have lost all capacity for participation in a shared human life. And so I certainly believe that it is not some quality or set of qualities that is sufficient for personhood, something that is simply shared by us or theoretically could be, that makes a creature human but rather something having to do with the preciousness and, indeed, sacredness of that life recognized when we see it in another.

I think the example of a dog that is highly intelligent, feels pain, lives among us, has learned to be in community with humans in impressive ways (walking off-leash, eating as the same time as the family does, answering basic to complex commands, even displaying something like empathic responses to human emotions and experience, as in, say, when my dog comes to lay beside me when he knows I am sad or have been hurt) still would not count as human, but the lifelong catatonic person would (to me), but it is hard to put our finger on precisely why without falling back on some notion of a divine telos or imago dei, image of God.

This brings me to my second point, which is to make clear where I depart from embryonic personhood, friends, and say that if your answer to why such a thing as a cluster of cells should be viewed in much the same way as a small child, or if you believe, as many in that camp do, that male masturbation is a mortal sin because sperm itself, at least with some serious help from eggs in need of fertilization, carries the potential for life because God says so, then we are at a serious impasse.
“Because God” cannot possibly be an answer to anything in a shared political, let alone moral, life and if we are falling back on that sort of framework for determining what gets counted as human and what doesn’t then the sky is truly the limit. There are, I believe, still eggs inside of my body and one wonders what the implications are for my personal freedom and bodily autonomy, setting aside a right to an abortion I used to have, in the AL ruling. Could states place restrictions on potentially dangerous work that I might engage in, places to which I might travel, people I might have intercourse with who carry sexually transmitted diseases, or foods I might eat that could threaten the safety and health of my last few remaining eggs that can still potentially be fertilized? Could it be argued that I have potential persons inside of me right now in the form of eggs that must be protected at all costs? (Maybe that is what it will finally take for women to actually get some protections and rights, but that’s another essay, too—ack!) There are as many interpretations of God’s word as there are translations, and the notion that what we count as a human could be based on an arbitrary notion of God’s will is not just terrifying but utterly confounding.

“Personhood” and “human” are not concepts handed down by God, though that might be a useful way of teaching lots of things about these moral, evaluative concepts. I suspect, as does moral philosopher Raymond Gaita, that “our sense of the preciousness of other people is connected with their power to affect us in ways we cannot fathom.” Like “love,” “mortality,” and “equality,” these are inter-personal concepts—that is, concepts that take shape alongside our lives with others in whom we see something of ourselves, through relationships and interactions with other beings (beings here with us, not ones that might one day be here with us if everything goes according to plan)—and there is a significant role that is played by bodily responses, enacted witnessing and feeling in the disclosure of such meanings to us. Here, I find the work of philosopher Raimond Gaita to be hugely helpful. I want to cite at length a passage in which Gaita is describing his experience as a young man, working as an assistant on a psychiatric ward. He writes:

The patients were judged to be incurable and they appeared to have irretrievably lost everything which gives meaning to our lives. They had no grounds for self-respect insofar as we connect that with self-esteem; or, none which could be based on qualities or achievements for which we could admire or congratulate them without condescension…A small number of psychiatrists did, however, work devotedly to improve their conditions. They spoke, against all appearances, of the inalienable dignity of even those patients. I admired them enormously…One day a nun came to the ward. In her middle years, only her vivacity made an impression on me until she talked to the patients. Then everything in her demeanour towards them - the way she spoke to them, her facial expressions, the inflexions of her body – contrasted with and show up the behaviour of those noble psychiatrists. She showed that they were, despite their best efforts, condescending, as I too had been. She thereby revealed that even such patients were, as the psychiatrists and I had sincerely and generously professed, the equals of those who wanted to help them; but she also revealed that in our hearts we did not believe this.^[1]

Of course, we are all of us familiar with this distinction: what we believe in our hearts is often incongruous with what we display in our behavior. But then Gaita goes on to draw out the example in such a way that really reveals the power of his work for our question of how we regard people as fully human, irrespective of qualities they do or do not possess:

If I am asked what I mean when I say that even such people as were patients in that ward are fully our equals, I can only say that the quality of her love proved that they are rightly the objects of our non-condescending treatment, that we should do all in our power to respond in that way. But if someone were now to ask me what informs my sense that they are rightly the objects of such treatment, I can appeal only to the purity of her love. For me, the purity!!!! the love proved the reality of what it revealed view of the speculative intelligence, however, I am go darkening circles, because I allow for no independent justification of her attitude.^[2]

In other words, it is not owing to some quality or behavior on the part of the patients that justifies the nun’s different kind of interaction to which Gaita can point as evidence that they truly are his equals, but rather that the truth of the claim is revealed to him in new ways, a claim for which he has a deepened and, we might say, more accurate understanding, after having borne witness to the nun’s interaction. She sees the patients and counts them as fully human and equal to her in a way that Gaita and the other psychiatrists only professed (with the best of intentions) but then gave condescension in a way that betrayed the profession and demonstrated that “in their hearts” they did not believe it. Gaita goes on to say that her behavior is striking not for the virtues it expresses, or even the good it achieves, but for its power to reveal the full humanity of those whose affliction had made their humanity invisible. He says, quite beautifully, “Love is the name we give to such behaviour.” But note the radical nature of the claim. It isn’t just that the nun’s example gave him a deeper appreciation of the sense in which the patients are fully human *and* fully his equals, but also that there is no other way he could have come by that understanding than by bearing witness to the woman’s interactions and behavior. He came to a fuller, more appropriate and, we might say, deeply embodied understanding of a moral concept—namely, equality—only by watching and carefully discerning the nun and her interactions with others. It is true, of course, that such discernment is itself something to which people need to be habituated (indeed, there are some in whom no possibility for that kind of noticing and witnessing exists; although, it feels in these passages that the patients noticed it, which is significant), but it is also a fairly accurate description of how a lot of moral life and learning happens.

What is remarkable to me and useful about this passage is the way it invites reflection on how we actually count others as humans and whether anything like independent corroboration is something we generally look to when we decide who counts and who doesn’t. I think the answer is no, but I would not ground our knowing in a belief in the supernatural. Rather, I ground my knowing that you are human just like me, in the ways in which your humanity is disclosed to me in countless ways in and through embodied, en-acted actual and possible interactions, often involving others’ interactions with you, that reveal something of a genuine equal standing in the human community, irrespective of qualities, values, skills, behaviors or aptitudes you possess. The humanity of another is disclosed to us through countless extraordinary and ordinary interactions and context-dependent situations wherein something like personhood, the preciousness of life, abides.

But, of course, human beings cannot enact this type of relationship with just anything—not with a stone, for example, nor even with a tree, or a dog. Certainly not with an embryo, and doubtful with a fetus. As Mark Wynn notes, on an essay on the philosophy of religion and which draws on Gaita’s example, “anything which can figure in such a relationship is thereby shown to have a special kind of importance—an importance relative to the kind of role it can play in human life. And we might take it as a basic truth that anything which is capable of entering so profoundly into a human life ought to be treated with the kind of respect that the nun shows the patients. So I think Gaita would say that here we are dealing with a fundamental judgement of value, one that cannot be further argued: if the nun can relate to the patients on the basis of genuine equality, then it is incumbent upon you and me to relate to people such as the patients on that ward on the same basis, so far as we can.”

That last bit strikes me as so important. So far as we can. I can, of course, love my dog, Blue, and feel his love for me, and I can, without question, give him all the love he so deserves that is fitting and appropriate for a dog. (He is deserving of so much, if you ask me, as he is the very best one.) But I could never love him in the way that I am called to love the patients on the ward with Gaita and the nun, because their preciousness is different in kind from my German Shorthair Pointer. He both is a part of our family and forever excluded from it in profound ways. For as smart and winning as he is, he is not now nor will he ever be capable of entering into our shared moral life, wherein a certain kind of (human) bodily demeanor and radical individuality marks out a human life. He isn’t excluded from our human family because he lacks a particular quality that, were he in possession of it, would grant him admission, but rather because he is not the kind of creature who can share in a life of grief, hope, love, guilt, shame and remorse that, along with other central moral concepts, disclose our humanity to us and invite a certain way of enacting relationships. An embryo, too, is not something to which I can relate in this way, not even something I can fathom relating to like this. I can imagine it, dream of it, wish for it. But I cannot see it as a human because its humanity would have to be disclosed to me in and through the myriad of interactions and possibilities for practicing love that are revealed to us every day by living with our fellow humans.

This is bad news for how I regard an embryo, I suppose, if you are on the side of it, but it is good news for how I regard you. Although my inclination is to retreat from conversation and intellectual exchange and make no attempt to persuade or ask you to see it differently, I can never fully abandon you in the way that I can, say, a stone, my favorite houseplant, or my dearest Blue. And though I may believe you to be unwell, confused or just plain crazy, I have a love for you that is so pure and so abiding that not only does it not require you to believe this and not that as justification for my love, your specific beliefs or capacity for any belief at all is not even permitted in a defense of why I love you. I love you for the simple fact of your existence here with me and because you uniquely have the power to affect me in ways that I cannot fathom, and I am daily reminded that more often than not we learn that someone is precious only when we see it in the light of someone else’s love.

[Image above by Joanie Schwarz]

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^[1] Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity. Thinking About Love & Truth & Justice

(Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1999), pp. 17-1

^[2] Gaita, 21-22