When Is Man A
Person?
The basic question concerning the identity of the zygote-embryo-fetus can be broken down into smaller parts, and progress can be made toward a satisfactory answer from this perspective.
First of all, is it alive? Webster defines "life" in this way: "The quality or character distinguishing an animal or a plant from inorganic or from dead organic bodies, which is especially manifested by metabolism, growth, reproduction, and internal powers of adaptation to environment." Other definitions are added, but this first definition is the biologic dimension of life apart from which it is meaningless to talk of the spiritual, psychological, social, and other dimensions of life. At least by the biologic dimension, the zygote-embryo-fetus is alive (metabolizing, growing, and adapting).
But is it human life? Does it belong to or relate to man? Without trying to sound facetious, I might ask: "What other choice is there?" It certainly isn't zebra life or azalea life or chicken life or guppy life. Obviously not. It is human life.
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But so is my fingernail! Which raises still a third question.
Is it human being? Is it an individual, a person? The answer to this question will require considerably more attention because it brings us back to the heart of the matter, to the point where the real difference of opinion exists. No one, except certain people who seem to have surrendered all rationality, has a problem with the claim that the zygote-embryo-fetus is alive and is human life. But when it is suggested by pro-life people that the zygote-embryo-fetus is veritable, individual human life (a human being or person), then the feathers begin to fly.
The legal implications of this question are far-reaching. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the Unites States says: "Nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction that equal protection of the laws." The only way that abortion can be allowed by law, then, is if it can be proven that the zygote-embryo-fetus is not a person. The United States Supreme Court was faced with this question recently: Is the unborn a human person entitled to the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment, or not? Their "non-answer" was that the term "person" as used in the Constitution "has application only postnatally."
There are three possible positions on the question of when the human being (person) begins, all of which involve doing some kind of defining of what a person is"
(1) The human person begins at birth or at some later point.
(2) The human person begins at some point during the period of gestation.
(3) The human person begins at conception.
Begins at Birth or Some Later Point
In a public debate between the Colorado Right To Life and the Mountain States Women's Abortion Coalition, held at the University of Colorado some time ago, the
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debating representative of MSWAC was asked: "If you were pregnant and gave birth prematurely to an alive child at six and one-half months, would you consider such a child a human person entitled to the same protection of the Fourteenth Amendment as you are?" Her answer was: "Yes, most definitely." She was then asked: "If you were pregnant with an unwanted child and had that alive child aborted two days before full term (which is possible in the state of Colorado), would you consider such a child a human person entitled to protection under the Fourteenth Amendment?" Her response was: "No." The questioner then commented to the audience: "It does not seem to matter how long the zygote-embryo-fetus is present in the womb as to establishing its identity as person, but rather whether or not the zygote-embryo-fetus is born." He went on to ask: "What magic occurs at birth which changes a potential person into an actual person?" No answer was given.
Dr. R. F. R. Gardner, a consultant obstetrician and gynecologist, expresses a point of view about personhood quite similar to that expressed above.
From time to time obstetricians have the distress of delivering a stillborn baby. We may have felt this fetus kick under our examining hands, we may have listened to its heartbeat repeatedly over four months, yet when the tragedy occurs we do not feel, "Here is a child who has died," but rather, "Here is a fetus which so nearly made it." 1
This may be how one or several obstetricians feel. But the question "Why?" cannot be drowned under a wave of feelings. Why do you say, doctors, that fetuses become persons at birth? What "reasons" do you have?
The memory of childbirth is vivid in my mind. Recently, my wife gave birth to our third child, a beautiful girl name Sarah. I was privileged to be with my wife during
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the whole time of labor and delivery. Soon after my wife had gone into labor and we had left for the hospital, I remembered something I had learned from the famous fetologist, Dr. Albert Liley, that it is the baby who gives the signal hormonally when it is time for the mother to go into labor. And I thought: "Is it a person now?" But then I remembered how this same baby had hormonally stopped its mother's menstrual periods just one week after implantation, and from that time on had taken complete charge of the pregnancy. And I thought: "Was it perhaps a person then?" At the hospital the doctor would come in now and then and check the dilation of the cervix. He would comment about how the child had moved to a new "station" in its downward journey. I thought: "Is it a person yet?" Later, in the delivery room, the head of my unborn child began to show. "It has black hair," the doctor said. I thought: "Is it a person yet?" Very soon I heard a garbled cry, and the doctor, while suctioning the mucus out of the child's mouth, exclaimed: "It's a girl!" And I thought: "Little Sarah, are you a person yet?" And then the umbilical cord was cut, and I thought: "Does that make you a person, Sarah? Or must you first open your eyes, or smile, or babble 'dada,' or crawl, or walk, or go to school, or ....?"
In Canada, the unborn child becomes a person when the cord is cut. At that point, it is argued, the child is no longer part of the mother; it becomes an independent being. But both these statements (that the child until birth is part of the mother and that the child until birth is dependent) are open to much question.
As to the first statement, how does it match up to the following facts?
(1) There is a unique forty-six chromosomal pattern in every little one, present from the moment of conception.
(2) The placenta, the fluid in the sac, and the cord are all organs of the baby.
(3) The mere fact of attachment does not make the child part of the mother any more than a car
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becomes part of a gas pump to which it is attached for fueling purposes.
(4) The mother provides the child in her womb the same supports she provides outside the womb: A protective environment and nourishment. In the womb, the nourishment comes through the tube (there is, incidentally, no exchange of blood); in the mother's arms, the nourishment comes through the breast or bottle.
And how does the second statement stand up to the following considerations?
(1) The child is no less dependent upon the mother for vital life support immediately after birth than immediately before.
(2) Dependency is a purely relative criterion for personhood and can be defined in any number of ways by any number of "experts."
(3) By certain criteria (and who is to say that they are not valid criteria?) the human being never becomes completely independent of others for the satisfaction of his basic needs.
(4) Using independence as a basis for defining personhood logically opens the door to justifying euthanasia for old people or the mentally retarded who have become burdens to their families and to society because of their total dependency.
Many people (particularly Protestant theologians) attach some kind of mystical significance to the child's first breath, and say that this is the magical bridge from potential human life to actual human life. Once again I quote from R. F. R. Gardner (Dr. Gardner is also an ordained minister in the United Free Church of Scotland):
My own view is that while the fetus is to be cherished increasingly as it develops, we should regard its first breath as the moment when God gives it not only life, but the offer of Life. Now this is not an example of the Christian retreating in the face of a scientific attack. This surely is the original biblical teaching that God took a fully-formed man and breathed into
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his nostrils the breath of life, and thus man became a living creature —Adam.2
The theological accuracy of Gardner's statement is questionable, but I will reserve theological comment until later. I will simply refer now to an experience, related by Dr. Albert Liley, of a doctor who attempted to locate a placenta on X ray by injecting an air bubble into the unborn baby's amniotic sac. When it so happened that the air bubble covered the baby's face, the child began to breathe air and of course, cry. (Normally, the unborn child breathes fluid within his mother's womb; this is done to develop the organs of respiration. During this time the child obtains his oxygen through his umbilical cord.) The mother stated to her doctor that the baby cried so loudly that she had trouble resting.
Question: Is this unborn, crying, breathing baby a person?
There is another haunting question, too, that will not lie down and be quiet: If the miracle of personhood occurs at birth (when the cord is cut and/or when the child breathes), what about a hysterotomy abortion? A hysterotomy is a minor Caesarean section, and is one of the four methods of abortions. All children aborted by hysterotomy are born alive; they move, breathe, and some cry. The cords are cut and, it seems, they reach the point at which personhood becomes a reality. But what happens? Because they are not wanted, they are thrown into a bucket and encouraged to die. In the state of New York in 1971, approximately four thousand persons were killed in this manner.
Maybe the moment of birth is too arbitrary a point at which to locate the beginning of personhood after all.
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Maybe the people are right who say that personhood really begins at some point in the child's post partum existence. Maybe Dr. Robert H. Williams is right when he says:
The fetus has not been shown to be nearer to the human being than is the unborn ape. Even the full-term infant must undergo many changes before attaining full status of humanity. Only near the end of the first year of age does a child demonstrate intellectual development, speaking ability, and other attributes that differentiate him significantly from another species.4
One wonders in reading this statement whether the next lie to be sold in our culture will be the idea that infanticide (like feticide) is really not murder at all because children less than one year old are not persons.
Begins at Some Time During Gestation
The variety of times chosen by those who believe that human personhood begins at some time during gestation is about as wide as the number of choices available. Before the Supreme Court gave this nation what amounts to an abortion-on-demand national policy, various states set all kinds of different limits on abortion, depending on the particular criteria they chose by which to make such a judgment. In the state of Colorado there was no time limit on abortion, except when the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest, in which case the time limit was sixteen weeks. It is anybody's guess what the rationality behind Colorado's position was. In Alaska and Hawaii, abortion was available on demand until the time of viability; in Maryland the limit was twenty-six weeks; in New York, another abortion-on-demand state, the limit was twenty-four weeks; in eleven states the limit was twenty weeks; in thirty-four states the limit was conception.5 But the Supreme Court
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decisions canceled out all these state laws by saying that the term "person" in the Constitution "has application only postnatally."
Who is right? Or doesn't it matter any more than that Nebraska has a speed limit of 75 mph while Illinois has a speed limit of 70 mph? Are we ready to concede that the question of when human personhood begins is purely a matter of definition, not of fact? But then, how have we protected ourselves from the power elitists (legislators, doctors, psychiatrists, and judges) who in a given society may use the principle of "defining as one wishes" to define all kinds of people (the "useless eaters," the incurably ill, the racially impure, the habitual criminals, and the less than one-year-old children) as nonpersons and therefore not entitled to protection under the Fourteenth Amendment? On the surface, this new ethic for society may not sound too threatening. But the first small step away from principle is a complete change of direction after which all other steps are but inevitable downward progressions.
Is there a single criterion that can establish our decision on the rock of fact rather than on the slush of definition? What about viability? As the term "viability" is used in connection with the abortion issue, it means the capability of living as a newborn infant outside the womb. In the past, viability was believed to be about twenty-eight weeks. The skills of the developing sciences of fetology, neonatology, and obstetrics have brought viability down to about twenty weeks. Dr. J. C. Willke (coauthor of The Handbook on Abortion) predicts that viability will be brought down to twelve weeks by the turn of the century. So as medical discipline advances, viability keeps changing. Is this the solid rock of fact we are looking for? Dr. Willke is more to the point when he says: "Viability is a measurement of the sophistication of the external life support system, not directly of the baby him or her self."6
What about quickening, the time when the mother first feels movement within her? In an amicus curiae brief submitted
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to the Illinois Supreme Court, Dr. Bart Heffernan argues:
... quickening is a relative concept which depends upon the sensitivity of the mother, the position of the placenta, and the size of the child .... But modern science has proven conclusively that any law based upon quickening is based upon shifting sands — a subjective standard even different among races. We now know that life precedes quickening; that quickening is nothing other than the mother's first subjective feeling of movement in the womb. Yet the fetus we know has moved before this. In spite of these advances in medicine, some courts and legislatures have continued to consider quickening as the point when life is magically infused into the unborn.... No concept could be farther from the scientific truth.7
So where are we? One man says that the fetus becomes a person when the child breathes; another, when the cord is cut; another, when the child can survive outside the womb; another, when the mother feels the child's movement; another, when the heart begins to beat; and another, when there is discernible brain activity. Who is right? Or doesn't it matter?
Then maybe it doesn't matter so much either that men such as Representative Hackett in Florida are submitting death selection (euthanasia) bills to their legislatures. These bills are based on their definitions of when personhood ends, which only stands to reason.8 If the beginning of personhood is purely a matter of definition and not of fact, then also is the ending of personhood.
Can this society, or any society, stand a quality-of-life ethic? History has said it can't. Modern secular society evidently refuses to learn this hard lesson of history. It childishly and masochistically persists in a philosophy
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that threatens its own dehumanization and eventual destruction.
Begins at Conception
The earliest possible time, logically and biologically, to consider when the human being begins is, of course, conception. Although the sperm and ovum are both alive, they are radically different from the fertilized ovum. It is at this juncture, indeed that the distinction between potential human life and actual human life is applicable.
Dr. and Mrs. Willke, who have done a great service to the pro-life cause through their Handbook on Abortion and their tapes, have this to say on one of their tapes about the sperm, the ovum, and the fertilized ovum:
The sperm has life, the ovum has life. The sperm does have life, but it is a life that is a sharing in the life of the father. The sperm with only half as many chromosomes, is nevertheless identified chromosomally as a cell of the body of the father. Furthermore, the sperm is at the end of its maturation cycle, having but one purpose in existence, to fertilize an ovum. Failing that the sperm must die. It is at the end of the line; it cannot reproduce itself. The human ovum, similarly, is a cell of the mother's body, so identified chromosomally. It too has life, but it is a sharing in the life of the body of the mother, it too having but one purpose in existence, i.e., to be fertilized or to die. But when the two join, we have at that instant created a new living being. Judge this being to be human at that moment or not, we cannot deny the biologic fact of the total uniqueness of this new living being, a new being that is not at the end of the line, but at the dawn, a new being containing within him or her self the totality of everything an old man or woman will ever be, a new living being that is programmed to live eight and one-half months within the mother and as many as ninety years without. When, then, does human life begin? 9
In the October 1971 term of the Supreme Court of the
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United States, a distinguished group of 220 physicians, professors, and fellows of the American College of Obstetrics and gynecology submitted an amicus curiae brief to the Court. In this brief they tried to show how modern science established that the unborn child from the moment of conception is a person and therefore, like the mother, a patient. John M. Langone has succinctly summarized this brief in a Cambridge Fish article entitled "Abortion: The Medical Evidence Against," (reprinted from the Boston Herald Traveler). Because of my meager knowledge of the biological side, I wish to quote extensively from this article the portion that pertains to the development of the child from conception through three months:
From conception, when the sperm and egg unite, the child is a complex, dynamic, rapidly growing organism.
By a natural and continuous process, the single fertilized egg will, over approximately nine months, develop into the trillions of cells of the newborn. The natural end of the sperm and egg is death unless fertilization occurs. At fertilization, a new and unique being is created which, although receiving one-half of its chromosomes from each parent, is really unlike either.
About seven to nine days after conception, when there are already several hundreds cells of the new individual formed, contact with the uterus is made, and implantation and nourishment begin. Blood cells form at 17 days, and a heart as early as 18 days. The heart starts irregular pulsating at 24 days and about a week later smooths into rhythmic contractions. (Some investigators have observed occasional contractions of the heart in a two-week-old embryo. The new human being is called an embryo until the third month, a fetus after that until birth.)
At about 18 days, the development of the nervous system is under way, and by the 20th day the foundation of the child's brain, spinal cord and entire nervous system is established.
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By the sixth week after conception, this system will have developed so well that it is controlling movements of the baby's muscles, even though the woman may not be aware that she is pregnant.
By the 33rd day, the cerebral cortex (that part of the central nervous system that governs motor activity as well as intellect) may be seen. The baby's eyes begin to form at 19 days, and by the end of the first month the foundation of the brain, spinal cord, nerves and sense organs are completely formed.
By 28 days, the embryo has the building blocks for 40 pairs of muscles, and by the end of the first month, the child has completed the period of relatively greatest size increase and the greatest physical change of a lifetime.
Now, the child is 10,000 times larger than the fertilized egg and will increase its weigh six billion times by birth, having in only the first month gone from the one-cell stage to millions of cells.
By the beginning of the second month, the unborn child looks distinctly human, yet the mother is not aware that she is pregnant....
At the end of the first month, the child is about a quarter of an inch long.
At 30 days, the child and mother do not exchange blood, the child having from a very early point in its development its own and complete vascular system.
Earliest reflexes begin as early as the forty-second day, the male penis begins to form, cartilage has begun to develop. Even at five-and-a-half weeks, the fetal heartbeat is essentially similar to that of an adult; the energy output is about 20 percent that of the adult but the fetal heart is functionally complete and normal by seven weeks. At this point, the child may be likened to a one-inch miniature doll with a large head, but gracefully formed arms and legs and an unmistakably human face.
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The body is covered with skin, the arms have hands and fingers, the legs have knees, ankles and toes.
By the end of seven weeks, the doctors pointed out in their brief, there is a well-proportioned small-scale baby. It bears the familiar external features and all the internal organs of the adult, even though it weighs less than an ounce.
"The new body not only exists, it also functions," the doctors declared.
The brain, in its shape and general outline, is already like the adult brain and sends out measurable impulses that coordinate the function of the other organs. Brain waves have been noted at 43 days, the heart beats strongly, the stomach produces digestive juices, the liver manufactures blood cells and the kidneys are functioning. The muscles of the arms and body can already be set in motion.
After the eighth week, no further original organs will form — everything that is already present will be found in the full-term baby. From this point until adulthood, when full growth is achieved somewhere between 25 and 27 years, the changes in the body will mainly in dimension and in gradual refinement of the working parts.
"The genetic patterns set down in the first day of life instructs the development of a specific anatomy," the report noted.
In the third month, the child becomes very active and by the end of the month kicks his legs, turns his feet, moves his thumbs, bends his wrists, turns his head, frowns, squints and opens his mouth.
He can swallow, and he drinks the amniotic fluid that surrounds him. He sucks his thumbs, and the first respiratory motions are noticed.
During the ninth and tenth weeks, the whole body becomes sensitive to touch, and by the end of the twelfth week, the child's movements
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are no longer like that of a puppet. They are now graceful and fluid, as they are in the newborn. The child is active and the reflexes are becoming more vigorous, and all this is before the mother feels any movement....
Further refinements are noted in the third month, such as the appearance of fingernails, enhancement of the child's face and the differentiation of internal and external sexual organs. Primitive eggs and sperm are formed, and the vocal cords are completed. In the absence of air, they cannot produce sound. The child cannot cry aloud until birth, although he is capable of crying long before....
"This review of the current medical status of the unborn," the doctors said in their brief, "serves us several purposes. First, it shows conclusively the humanity of the fetus by showing that human life is a continuum which commences in the womb. There is no magic in birth. The child is as much a child in those several days before birth as he is those several days after." 10
These biological facts are impressive, but they are not sufficient to totally convince everyone that the human person begins at conception. There are some who believe (myself included) that personhood is a spiritual concept, not meaningful without reference to the relationship between God and man, and not ultimately explainable except in a "theological context."
Most of the theological argumentation has been left up to the Roman Catholic theologians (to whom we owe a deep debt of gratitude) and is buried on seminary library shelves in theological works not read by many. I shall try in the next chapter to make a theological case for personhood at conception by sharing a few thoughts from the Protestant side, hoping that it may reach the hands of a few average people who, like myself, do not consider themselves "experts" in the field of theology.
Chapter 4 || Table of Contents
1. R.F.R. Gardner, Abortion: The Personal Dilemma (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1972), p. 126.
2. Ibid., p. 126.
3. This experience related by Dr. Liley is recorded in the Amicus Curiae brief submitted by 220 physicians, professors, and fellows of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology to the United States Supreme Court in the Texas and Georgia cases (Roe vs. Wade and Doe vs. Bolton).
4. Robert H. Williams, "Our Role in the Generation, Modification and Termination of Life," Archives of Internal Medicine, 1969.
5. Statistics from Dr. and Mrs. J.C. Willke's tape Abortion, How It Is, available from Hiltz Publishing Co., 6304 Hamilton Ave., Cincinnati, Ohio 45224.
6. Ibid.
7. Bart Heffenan, Amicus Curiae brief submitted to the Illinois Supreme Court, pp. 38, 39.
8. The bill submitted by Representative Sackett is reprinted on page 18 of Handbook on Population by Robert L. Sassone.
9. Willke, Abortion, How It Is (tape).
10. John M. Langone, "Abortion: the Medical Evidence Against," The Cambridge Fish 2, no. 1, pp.2,9 (reprinted from the Boston Herald Traveler).