Representatives of different faiths frequently intervene in debates around fertility and assisted reproduction, with religious perspectives cited in recent months both in support of and in opposition to the UK’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology (HFE) Bill. But religious attitudes towards the human embryo are not always well understood, and can be counterintuitive. This is particularly true when views of the embryo differ not only between the world’s major religions, but also according to different denominations and traditions within each religion. (Conference Website)
9.30am-5pm, Wednesday 19 November 2008
Clifford Chance, 10 Upper Bank St, London, E14 5JJ
July 31st, 2008 at 5:29 pm
Notwithstanding the importance of religious views toward the embryo, current judicial interpretation of the Establishment Clause leads us to use temporal analysis to ground our view that human embryos are moral persons deserving standard legal protections that uphold human dignity. Proof of the personhood of human embryos can be demonstrated as follows. The proof stems off the example of the man diagnosed to be temporarily comatose. Such an individual possesses two key variables. First, the comatose man is a living biological human individual. Second, attending physicians diagnose that the comatose man will regain their consciousness and personality again in the future. In this case, although the comatose man presently has no awareness, he is still judged to be a full moral person based on membership in the species, and on the mere potential that he will have awareness at some future point. So in addition to obvious membership in the human species, evidence to support the comatose man’s personhood is rooted more specifically in the “present physical attributes of physiology” that give the medical team reason to believe the odds are respectable that the man will have awareness in the future. The moral significance of these attributes is specifically that they lead physicians to conclude the man has a good chance to possess awareness in the future. (Theoretically, any attribute that would lead physicians to conclude the human individual would have a good chance for awareness in the future would provide evidence for personhood.) These two variables (membership in the human race and attributes that lead physicians to conclude the man has a good chance to have awareness in the future), primarily, work together to proffer full evidence that this man is a moral person. Minimally, medicine recognizes the moral obligation to treat this man as a moral person. Human embryos also possess these same two attributes. Human embryos are biological individuals from the start of conception when their unique genotype has been initially determined. (DNA is the main variable that answers the most questions about how individuality continues in terms of differences between and within species. Thus, DNA would also answer the most questions about how the same individuality would start.) And a good percentage of the time, human embryos possess attributes that give us reason to believe they will possess awareness and personality in the future. It makes no sense for someone to claim they would value their life in a coma (their doctors diagnosed to be temporary) since they would regain their awareness and personality at a later time, but that they would not value their life as a human embryo, specifically because they did not yet possess present awareness - the very trait they would not require in order to value their life as the person diagnosed with temporary coma. Consistency in logic requires that if society upholds the dignity of persons diagnosed temporarily comatose, public policy must also uphold the dignity of the unborn, who possess the same two primary functional traits that lead society to treat as moral persons the temporarily comatose.
September 6th, 2008 at 6:05 am
An embryo is the earliest cells of human life (the same potential beginnings that a woman has every time she has sex with her partner, and may go on to be pregnant, or may indeed go on to menstruate).
An embryo only becomes human life once it has implanted/ embedded in the uterus…ie the woman is impregnated. Whether or not this happens to an embryo is very questionable, hence why so many IVF cycles fail. To equate the rights of an embryo with the rights of a human (even one in a coma) with this in mind, is ludicrous. One is a possibility/ a hopeful potential for human life, one actually is human life!