Bradford Short in the NYT: Scientifically, Human Life Begins at Conception
Along the same lines as James J. Johanik's letter in the Wall Street Journal that I reprinted the other day, the New York Times (!!!) published a letter written by my good friend Bradford Short that makes basically the same point: Based on the science, human life begins at conception. Short takes it to the next step by asserting that this matters morally, and indeed, that protecting human life simply and merely because it is human (my term) is the principle that President Bush is defending with his embryonic stem cell funding policy.
Here is Short's letter: "It has been too common in the debate on embryo-destructive stem cell research for those who support such research to tell a story of the Enlightenment, where noble, wise scientists had to fight selfish, backward, religious ethicists for 'science' to advance.
"In fact, it was the most progressive scientists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries who first discovered that human life begins at conception; that the human embryo from conception on is a self-organized, individual human being. It was people who thought that this scientific discovery was important for ethics who then criminalized abortion before the quickening in Britain and America in the 19th century.
"It is the right to life as they, the scientists, had helped to define it that President Bush feels is being violated by embryo-destructive stem cell research today."
Bradford is right on the history and the science. This doesn't settle the matter, however, since many people hold to the idea that "personhood" rather than "humanhood" is what infuses life with moral meaning. But if we are to have a societal debate about the ethical propriety of treating nascent human life as a natural resource, then it must begin with the scientifically accurate acknowledgment that what is being discussed is indeed, fully human life. Any debate that avoids that scientific truth is not morally serious.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 1:06 PM
4 Comments
4 Comments:
Thank you again for this real service. I'd like to quote from Philip Rieff's My Life Among the Death Works, p. 68, touching on this subject:
"...the third culture believes it can live by infinitely changing rules. But the evidence is massive that no culture lives by rules. It lives by faith in highest absolute authority and its interdicts and subserving remissions. Rules as they were, under divine law, no longer exist. They did not survive Auschwitz. What did exist as the exemplary institution of the third culture, the death camps, were routines of resolution of everything human. It is an understandable failure of nerve among commentators on those routines of resolution of everything human to use the psychologically toned metaphor 'regression' to 'bestiality', an inversion of the progressive evolutionary ethos. proclaimed, by post-Jewish and post-Christian proponents of the third culture, as the second perfected without further need of highest absolute authority and its theonomic disciplines
That's a little above my pay grade. I think your author is positing that we have become entirely relativistic, in that we live by infinitely changing rules. That seems clear to me.
But I don't think that Auschwitz destroyed culture and morality. Indeed, the Holocaust caused us to recoil away from the evils that led to that unprecedented evil, e.g., eugenics, a belief that human life had no intrinsic value, etc. I think the problem is that we have forgotten and now people begin to move in the wrong direction again. It is harder to see because rather than being motivated by hate, those who deny human exceptionalism are today mostly motivated by compassion and a desire to do good. But denying human intrinsic value sets matters in motion that eventually lead to a plunge off of a moral cliff.
Yes, the line about Auschwitz also did not ring true to me. Good point about the compassion and desire to do good blinding people to the nature of the issue. In the end it is self-deceptive- a trick of the mind I think by which people convince themselves that they are doing good. But as Bob Dylan sang, "Sometimes the devil comes as a man of peace".
We are already so deep into this path of dehumanization that it is very troublesome.
"I don't think that Auschwitz destroyed culture and morality. Indeed, the Holocaust caused us to recoil away from the evils that led to that unprecedented evil, e.g., eugenics, a belief that human life had no intrinsic value, etc."
False.
Eugenics was practiced in the USA until the early 80s in Howard Dean's state of Vermont.
We soon after the Nazi holocaust started a eugenics program that argued its good for the population to abort lots and lots of undesirable baby boys and girls.
With over 50 million US lives slaughtered in the last 35 years in the USA we have murdered FAR MORE than the Nazi holocaust did.
And these murders are FAR WORSE since the Jews in Germany could run and attempt to escape those trying to kill them. Babies, on the other hand, are completely innocent and defenseless. That is why pro-aborts are WORSE than the Germans who supported the Nazi holocaust.
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