Is Jane Maienschein correct that chimerism and genetic mosaicism undercut the proposed Sanctity of Human Life Act of 2013, or Personhood Amendment? Or is Ramesh Ponnuru correct that genetic oddities have no bearing on it?
The Sanctity of Human Life Act of 2013 declares that “each human life begins with fertilization, cloning, or its functional equivalent, at which time every human has all legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood.” This is based in part on the idea that once fertilization has occurred, the person’s future identity is determined. From there, it’s just a straight line to birth, development, old age, and death. It’s arbitrary to pick some later moment in time to say that life has begun. But, in some cases, who the person will be (including what kind of DNA they will ultimately have) is not determined until later. For Ms. Maienschein, this presents a logical and philosophical challenge to the premise that life begins at fertilization and complicates the effort to confer “all legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood” onto a freshly fertilized egg. Does a chimera (where one twin has absorbed another) get two votes?
Mr. Ponnuru, however, isn’t interested in such complexities because he doesn’t think that they have any moral significance. The principle is that once an egg has been fertilized it is wrong to interfere in the development of that egg. If one egg subsumes the other, then one life is lost and no one is to blame. You don’t consider the resulting baby to be a murderer.
A living member of the species Homo sapiens in the embryonic stage of development can be treated as a person in the sense of its being wrong to act to bring about the end of its life, without being treated as having culpability for anything at all. The same is true of a member of the human species in the infant stage of development: You don’t hold them responsible for anything they do, but they’re still persons with the right not to be killed.
And the legislation Maienschein discusses, whatever its merits in general, is invulnerable to her objection because it stipulates that the life of a human being “begins with fertilization, cloning, or its functional equivalent.” The formation of a chimera could involve three fertilization or fertilization-equivalent events: the formation of each initial embryo, and then their combination into a new human embryo. At no point would it be proper, from the perspective of the pro-life law under discussion, to kill any of these human embryos. From that perspective there were two human lives worth protecting, which then ended and were replaced by a new human life worth protecting. He or she should get one vote, eventually.
Mr. Ponnuru’s stance makes sense, but it doesn’t wrestle with the philosophical questions. Much more interesting than embryonic voting rights is the relationship between life and identity. Can it be said that your life really began prior to your genetic code being determined and finalized? No one says that your life began when ovulation occurred, or when the father’s sperm began their competitive journey. The reason that the moment of fertilization feels like a compelling point to say that life begins is precisely because that is the moment when the genetic components are combined and cell division begins to occur. If you happen to be religious, this is when a new soul is created, a blessed and unique individual.
But the truth is that embryonic development isn’t that simple, and embryos may swap genetic material with the mother or a twin. What seemed like a magical determinative moment wasn’t necessarily quite that.
At the same time, I can understand Mr. Ponnuru’s principle, which is pretty basic: don’t interfere with the process of embryonic development because you will be ending a process that could result in a live baby.
Even if you’re willing to go along with Ponnuru’s principle, the questions raised by Maienschein are relevant to whether certain methods of birth control constitute ending a life.