An Alabama court ruling that embryos legally qualify as children has produced an interesting conundrum for conservative pro-life ideology. They often claim that abortion at any stage is morally impermissible because embryos are unborn children and deserve equal protection from being killed.
Nikki Haley has said that she believes embryos are “babies” but later clarified that she didn’t necessarily agree with the court’s ruling. This has revealed conflicting sentiments: sure, embryos deserve equal protection but it’s an acceptable consequence that many embryos are destroyed once IVF treatments are completed.
Well, you can’t have it both ways. The concept of totipotency does the heavy lifting for the pro-life argument. A totipotent entity is one which would develop into a complete organism if it were placed in an appropriate environment. Embryos are totipotent because they would develop into normal fully formed humans if placed in a woman’s uterus.
The pro-life argument proceeds by claiming that totipotence is sufficient for granting an entity full moral status such that it would be impermissible to harm it, which is what happens during abortions. Totipotence has been criticized extensively as a sufficient condition for moral status on the grounds that there are other entities that count as totipotent, like somatic cells, that clearly do not have moral status.
Setting that aside, if it’s right that totipotence grants equal moral status, then much of what happens in IVF clinics is morally impermissible – many embryos are created but not all are implanted. If embryos really do have a right to life, it would be morally wrong to harm them even for the sake of creating another life.
Haley and other conservatives stopping short of agreeing with the court’s decision suggests that they might share the pro-choice intuition that killing an embryo isn’t nearly as bad as killing an actual child or even aborting a fetus in late pregnancy.
I would almost find it humorous if this ruling didn’t also involve risking one of the only opportunities that many couples dealing with heart-breaking infertility have for conceiving children. But aside from conservatives finding themselves unable to reconcile their views on abortion and embryos used for IVF, it’s important to point out the implications for the wider abortion debate.
This shouldn’t be treated by progressives as an opportunity to attack conservatives on the question of abortion. It’s an opportunity for us to come to a reasonable middle ground.
Presumably, even those of you who think that abortion is wrong likely don’t think that IVF should be outlawed, even while understanding that unused embryos are necessarily destroyed. IVF has given millions of couples struggling with infertility the opportunity to start a family of their own.
We can also look at it from a different angle. I think it’s quite reasonable to believe that whatever possible legal consequences an individual or a clinic should face because of the destruction of a couple’s embryos should fall well short of the legal consequences for the wrongful death of an actual child. If you sympathize with this, then you must believe that all else held equal, destroying an embryo is not as bad as killing a baby.
Pro-choice advocates should also relinquish the highly implausible view that moral status is only achieved after birth and that abortion rights should be completely unrestricted. There is no morally relevant difference between a fetus at eight months and a new born baby. This entails that it is at least as bad to kill the eight month old fetus as it is to kill a young child.
We can acknowledge that embryos do not have a full right to life while also conceding that fetuses, particularly in later stages of development, have some moral status that restrict the permissibility of aborting them.
Even though it’s virtually impossible to make a strong moral case for any one particular cut-off point for abortion, practically speaking, these developments have opened up the possibility of making headway towards sensible abortion laws.
All it takes is for us to acknowledge that, as highly fallible creatures, we don’t have all of the answers and that this is a very difficult problem. The best we can do is come to an agreement that would allow women to plan their own families while also being responsive to the moral status of unborn children.
Rafael Perez is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Rochester. You can reach him at rafaelperezocregister@gmail.com.