They either don’t get it, or don’t want you to

The media are in full steam with wall to wall coverage of the election campaigns, candidates and issues. You’d think that’s plenty of time for all those news folks to get all the facts, right?

Or maybe should that read….to get all the facts right. They’re not, and sometimes I can’t tell if it’s willful or mindless.

I cover so many media, print and broadcast, I don’t know where I heard this. But one of the TV anchors was questioning Missouri Senator Jim Talent a day or so ago about the stem cell amendment controversy in that state, and the anchorman tossed off some passing comment about this research ‘matter’ only being a blatocyst and not even being human life yet. Talent quickly recovered during his response and said “there’s no question a blastocyst is a human life–your question is whether it’s a ‘person’.” The anchor guy totally missed the reference and dropped the ball as they went to break…

These people who are paid big salaries to bring us big news every day ought to be doing better homework on the basics, at the very least. ‘Personhood’ argument aside (which is inarguable when based on sheer reason–just read Prof. Robert George), basic scientific fact is that when fertilization occurs, it is newly formed life of the species Homo sapiens. That means human.

If you don’t have the time to read Prof. George’s piece right now, here are some snips. Consider this your own talking point briefing, like a mini-Cliff Notes, and your homework will be better than some of those well-paid TV people.

A human embryo is not something different in kind from a human being, like a rock, or a potato, or a rhinoceros. A human embryo is a whole living member of the species Homo sapiens in the earliest stage of his or her natural development. Unless severely damaged or denied or deprived of a suitable environment, an embryonic human being will, by directing its own integral organic functioning, develop himself or herself to the next more mature developmental stage, i.e., the fetal stage. The embryonic, fetal, infant, child, and adolescent stages are stages in the development of a determinate and enduring entity—a human being—who comes into existence as a single cell organism (zygote) and develops, if all goes well, into adulthood many years later.

A human embryo (like a human being in the fetal, infant, child, or adolescent stage) is not properly classified as a “pre-human” organism with the mere potential to become a human being. No human embryologist or textbook in human embryology known to me presents, accepts, or remotely contemplates such a view. The testimony of all leading embryology textbooks is that a human embryo is—already and not merely potentially—a human being. His or her potential, assuming a sufficient measure of good health and a suitable environment, is to develop by an internally directed process of growth through the further stages of maturity on the continuum that is his or her life.

It is useful to begin thinking about the moral status of the human embryo by considering that the adult human being that is now you or me is the same human being who, at an earlier stage of his or her life, was an adolescent, and before that a child, an infant, a fetus, and an embryo. Even in the embryonic stage, you and I were undeniably whole, living members of the species Homo sapiens. We were then, as we are now, distinct and complete—though in the beginning we were, of course, immature— human organisms; we were not mere parts of other organisms.

Follow the argument. It holds up to all reason, with intellectual honesty. Not many of the backers of the Missouri amendment are using intellectual honesty in their arguments, or are willing to hold it up to reason, like George classically does here.

Now a supporter of embryo-killing for biomedical research might concede that a human embryo is a human being, yet deny that human beings in the early stages of their development are due full moral respect such that they may not be destroyed to benefit more fully developed human beings who are suffering from afflictions.

But to deny that embryonic human beings deserve full respect, one must suppose that not every whole living human being deserves full respect. And to do that, one must hold that those human beings who deserve full respect deserve it not in virtue of the kind of entity they are, but, rather, in virtue of some acquired characteristic that some human beings (or human beings at some stages) have and others do not have, and which some human beings have in greater degree than others.

In my judgment, this position is untenable…

And the next several paragraphs spell out why the position doesn’t hold up to reason. It has clarity that most media and polticians are missing.

Clearly, self-consciousness, or desires, or capacities for deliberation and choice, are arbitrarily selected degrees of development of capacities that all human beings possess in (at least) radical form from the coming into being of the organism until his or her death. So, it cannot be the case that some human beings and not others are intrinsically valuable, by virtue of a certain degree of development. Rather, human beings are intrinsically valuable (in the way that enables us to ascribe to them equality and basic rights) in virtue of what (i.e., the kind of being) they are; and all human beings—not just some, and certainly not just those who have advanced sufficiently along the developmental path as to be able to exercise their capacities for characteristically human mental functions—are intrinsically valuable.

Since human beings are intrinsically valuable and deserving of full moral respect in virtue of what they are, it follows that they are intrinsically valuable from the point at which they come into being. Even in the embryonic stage of our lives, each of us was a human being and, as such, worthy of concern and protection. Embryonic human beings whether brought into existence by union of gametes, SCNT, or other cloning technologies should be accorded the status of inviolability recognized for human beings in other developmental stages.

Any questions?