In his meticulous study of the case for harvesting older human embryos, The Organ Factory, William Saletan describes how embryonic stem cells are too difficult to work with, and how much less technically problematic it would be to harvest tissue from fetuses just under 8 weeks old. Moreover, he provides bioethical arguments that could be used to justify such harvesting.
But Saletan doesn’t mention Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer’s idea of personhood. Using this concept, there would be no need to cut off experimentation at 8 weeks. A fully-formed fetus, indeed, a newborn child, could also be used as a source of tissue, even organs, following Singer’s ethical guidelines.
Singer has written that he uses “the term ‘person’ to refer to a being who is capable of anticipating the future, of having wants and desires for the future...[N]ewborn human babies have no sense of their own existence over time. So killing a newborn baby—whether able-bodied or not—is never equivalent to killing a person... It’s different. That doesn’t mean that is not almost always a terrible thing to do. It is, but that is because most infants are loved and cherished by their parents, and to kill an infant is usually to do a great wrong to its parents.”
A newborn that has been brought to term—whether in a natural or an artificial womb--solely for the purposes of experimentation or organ and tissue harvesting would not necessarily have parents in the normal sense of the world. Or if it did, they would not love and cherish the infant, having decided from the start that it was fated for experimentation. No “great wrong,” therefore, would be done to the parents.
According to Singer, “[s]ince neither a newborn human infant nor a fish is a person, the wrongness of killing such beings is not as great as the wrongness of killing a person.” Singer specifies however that “[w]e do both infants and fish wrong if we cause them pain or allow them to suffer, unless to do so is the only way of preventing greater suffering.” Might the killing of a newborn and the use of its tissues and organs in research and therapy help find a cure for diabetes, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, and cancer? And if so, could that be construed as “preventing greater suffering”?
As a utilitarian, Singer states generally that in making a choice, he “must choose the course of action that has the best consequences, on balance, for all affected.” Are the health and lives of sufferers from the above-mentioned diseases affected in this case? What is the life of a newborn non-person compared to the lives of millions of persons?
Stephen S. Hall, in his Merchants of Immortality, writes that “[w]hen we can all agree that something goes against the essence of social norms...it’s not inappropriate to proscribe that activity through legislation and enforcement—at least while we feel our way through the new terrain. In the absence of such consensus, however...the social and political impulse to ban...nourishes itself on a kind of pessimism about the human condition, a lack of faith that we can understand and use our newfound powers wisely, a lack of faith that we can discriminate between desirable uses and undesirable uses...”
But can we ever all agree that a given experiment goes against the essence of social norms? Indeed, Singer writes that such a consensus is suspect to begin with. “[T]he fact that our moral intuitions are universal and part of our human nature,” the Princeton bioethicist asserts, “does not mean that they are right.” He cites recent research on the role of intuitive responses in ethical reasoning, and he concludes that “these findings should make us more skeptical about relying on our intuitions.”
Hall himself makes the case for experimentation that might not be universally acceptable. Writing about cloning for research, he states: “I don’t like the idea of being deprived of the possibility of a medicine...on the basis of a moral belief I don’t share....Ultimately, we go to our doctors for medicine, not a moral worldview.”
He qualifies this statement somewhat by saying that “[n]o one...desires a treatment or cure based on the wanton and self-interested instrumentalization of another human life...” But he is perhaps taking too much for granted. The mere fact of being human, according to Singer, confers no special status and presumably could not be used as an argument to stay an experimenter's hand.
A framework for the legalization of experimentation on older unborn human children has already been established in Roe v. Wade. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun opined that “the Constitution does not define "person" in so many words. Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment contains three references to "person."...But...the use of the word is such that it has application only post-natally. None indicates, with any assurance, that it has any possible pre-natal application.... All this...persuades us that the word "person," as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn.”
The banning of cloning for research purposes could also be construed as a violation of the right to privacy. Again in Roe v. Wade, Justice Blackmun wrote that “[t]he Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy. In a line of decisions, however...the Court has recognized that a right of personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy, does exist under the Constitution. In varying contexts, the Court or individual Justices have, indeed, found at least the roots of that right in the First Amendment...These decisions make it clear...that the right has some extension to activities relating to...procreation...contraception...” and “family relationships...”
It is likely that a right to personal cloning as a source for tissue and organs could be teased out of Roe v. Wade without much jurisprudential difficulty, depending on the makeup of the Supreme Court and the views of its members on cloning for research. And even if the Court rejected Singer’s argument that the newborn child is not a person, the constitutional protection of the “post-natal” child could be circumvented by the harvesting of the child just before delivery, or by bringing the child to term in an artificial womb.
The 2004 national platform of the Democratic Party contains a section stating the party’s views on embryonic stem cell experimentation:
“We will push the boundaries of science in search of new medical therapies and cures....President Bush has rejected the calls...for assistance with embryonic stem cell research. We will reverse his wrongheaded policy....We will pursue this research under the strictest ethical guidelines, but we will not walk away from the chance to save lives and reduce human suffering.”
How strict would the “strictest ethical guidelines” be? Stephen Hall gives us a hint, writing about the ethics advisory board of Advanced Cell Technology, a company that specializes in experimentation with embryonic stem cells. Hall quotes one of the board’s members as saying: “[O]ur purpose is not to determine whether this research direction itself is acceptable, but to do this right, in terms of all the human subjects and other issues...” Hall points out that “through careful selection of the membership” of “company-affiliated boards (or any ethics panels, for that matter)...you preselect the outcome of any ‘debate’ you ask the bioethicists to settle.”
Peter Singer has given his opinion on embryonic stem cell experimentation: “Ever since August 2001, when President Bush announced his shaky compromise policy on federal funding for research on stem cells, American scientists have been charging that the policy severely impedes progress in this promising new area....
"Last February [2004], as if to confirm what critics had been saying, South Korean scientists revealed that they had made embryonic human clones from adult women. One of these cloned embryos had developed long enough to permit stem cells to be extracted. The technique would, in principle, make possible the development of individual stem cell lines, taken from those who are ill and would benefit from the stem cells. There would then be no problem of rejection, for the stem cells used in treating the illness would be a perfect genetic match with the cells of the person in need of the treatment. Such research could not be done with federal funding in the United States.”
Although the Korean research turned out to be fraudulent, Singer’s enthusiasm for experimentation with cloned human embryos, as well as his disapproval of the current federal policy, is genuine.
In any case, according to Saletan, embryonic stem cell experimentation on embryos less than 14 days old will soon be old hat:
“To get transplantable tissue your body won't reject, cells from somebody else...won't do. You need cells with your DNA. You need a clone....But if the goal is tissue, clones aren't less useful after 14 days. They're more useful, precisely because they're differentiating into the cell types that patients need. Why stop research at 14 days? Once you say we can do this much of it, what's the difference?”
It remains to be seen whether the older unborn child, or indeed the newborn child, will be used as a source for tissues and organs. The legal and bioethical foundations for such use, however, seem to be already in place.
Works cited:
Democratic Party 2004 National Platform: http://www.democrats.org/pdfs/2004platform.pdf
Hall, Stephen S. Merchants of Immortality. NY, Mariner Books, 2003.
Roe v. Wade: http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0410_0113_ZO.html
Saletan, William. The Organ Factory. http://www.slate.com/id/2123269/entry/2123270/
Singer, Peter. The Harm that Religion Does. http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/200406--.htm
Singer, Peter. Should We Trust Our Moral Intuitions? http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/200703--.htm
Singer, Peter. Writings on an Ethical Life. NY, HarperCollins, 2000.