The Moral Metaphysics of the Right to Life Movement

“Life Begins at Conception” is a favorite meme of forced birth theorists. What they understand it to mean, is not at all what it says. What it means is that important human rights, rights that trump the rights of the woman, begin at conception.

 

A single celled zygote, they claim, has rights of personhood though well less in size than a poppy seed and of weight 10 orders of magnitude less than a human adult. Lacking a nervous system, the zygote is incapable of thought, feeling, or any other form of consciousness. It is functionally indistinguishable from the zygote of the least members of the animal kingdom. Photomicrography reveals barely a difference between human and fish zygotes.

Those who maintain that this unprepossessing entity is a person, sharing important rights with you and me, do not, of course, claim for the zygote all our rights. The zygote does not have the right to vote, to inherit, to own property, or to exercise freedom of movement.

One can imagine the personhood crowd wishing to restrict possible mothers, that is, any women of childbearing age, from places, activities, foods, drink, and company deemed too risky, unhealthy, or unsuitable for the microscopic hypothesized-person. Not yet; one step at a time, but logic is logic. At this historical moment the only right being aggressively legislated against women on behalf of zygotes is the rights not to be terminated. State enforcement of this right against the mother is, however, already of a kind and magnitude unthinkable as against any other competent, non-incarcerated, sentient human being.

As so much is done, and much more is presaged, in the name of the “life at conception” meme, it is worth taking a close look at its bona fides.

The zygote is human and alive.

True. The egg and sperm, however, were also human, not salmon sperm or ferret egg, and unquestionably alive. So, it is flatly wrong to say that human life begins at conception. It is not, however, politick to say that the egg is a person, still less the sperm.

The zygote is alive and diploid.

“Well, you know that we mean living and human in the right way. Biologists tell us that the human sperm has only 23 chromosomes. You and I and every other human being have 46.” This is not really what biology teaches, but let that go for the moment. The zygote is (usually) diploid, like you and I. The sperm and egg each haploid (again, usually). In this respect sperm and egg are each distinguishable from their immediate living human successor, the zygote. Have we arrived at a satisfactory “pro-life” understanding of “life at conception”? Is it true that anything alive, human, and diploid shares important rights with, say, five-year-old children?

No. Almost all the cells in a human body are diploid. Every time you get a finger poke it leads to the death of thousands of white blood cells, all human, all diploid, all having a DNA complement as rich as yours or mine. Yet, finger pokes are not murder.

The zygote is a human individual.

Human rights are held by living human individuals. This has often been cited as the difference that makes the difference in moral status between zygote and other human cells. However, human individuality is far from a necessary corollary of zygote-hood. (Despite the very clear declaration to the contrary by the Alabama Supreme Court discussed in my last post.)  

A particular zygote may be one of two precursors of a distinct human individual or the sole precursor of two, or more distinct human individuals. Two zygotes can fuse to produce a single zygote in tetragametic merger chimerism, and a single zygote can split, producing monozygotic (identical) twins, triplets, quadruplets, or quintuplets.

The abortion prohibitionist just should just stop saying that every zygote is a baby or an individual human being from conception to death. (But they won't.)

The zygote has the potential to be the or one of the precursors of one or more human individuals.  

There it is, “potential” – a tricky concept at best. Problems go back at least as far as Aristotle. One problem with its use in the zygote-rights argument is that the successful sperm surely had the potential to become the precursor of one or more human individuals. Actuality implies prior potentiality as Aristotle and Aquinas would confirm.

It is perfectly natural to say, indeed, that potentiality was present in all the unsuccessful sperm – ever. That’s what sperms and eggs are all about, potential. For the vast majority, the potential doesn’t become actual, of course, but potential there is. Why does precursor-hood for a zygote count as the right sort of potential, a potential that calls for protecting zygote life as rigorously as 5-year-old life?

A first move is to resort to the haploid/diploid distinction, once more. The sperm does not have the right sort of potential because it is mere precursor, lacking the chromosome count of actual human beings. Consider, however, the successful sperm and the egg as a pair, pre-fertilization. That pair is certainly a precursor and has, at least in many cases, 46 chromosomes.

Many such pairs become actual, birthed, human individuals. I expect we will be told that it is the wrong sort of potential because sperm and egg pre-fertilization are separate entities. However, we do not ordinarily shrink from using “potential” with reference to collections of separate entities. Five named women, we might say, have the potential to be a great starting basketball lineup, even if they are on three different teams and two of the players haven’t even met. Denying the potential of the sperm egg pair, or indeed of every sperm and every egg ever, is a matter, not of a priori logical or philosophical necessity, but of lining up the concept of “potential human being” with theological dogma or political expediency.

The support of human rights at conception via potentiality has, in addition to problems of philosophical arbitrariness, problems biological. It is simply false that every zygote has the potential to become a live birthed infant, let alone a child.  Some zygotes have 43 instead of 44 autosomal (non-sex) chromosomes. None survive to birth, usually leading to first trimester, typically early first trimester miscarriages. 45 autosomal chromosomes are also lethal pre-natally where the trisomy is of chromosome 16, 15, or 2. Largely because of chromosomal abnormalities zygotes surviving to birth are only a bit in the majority. Not every zygote does have the potential to be the precursor of a human being, even the precursor of an entity with a nervous system.

Is termination permissible for a fetus that has no possibility of being born alive, that is, for which the biological potential is simply not there? The “life at conception” partisan is sure to answer “No.”  The “potential human being like you or I” construal of “potential” is not biological but metaphysical, a metaphysics gerrymandered to serve religious doctrine or party politics. (To see which predominates for a given “right to lifer,” check whether “life begins at conception” has an exception for IVF conceptions. The facial contradiction does not seem to faze many aggressively “pro-life” politicians.)