Viability

“Whatever else anything is, it ought to begin by being personal.”  Kathleen to Joe (Meg Ryan to Tom Hanks) in “You’ve Got Mail.”

A friend told us recently about this meme on Facebook with a simple picture of an egg and the caption, “In Alabama, this is a chicken.”[i] A spirited discussion ensued with some friends about the controversial Alabama Supreme Court decision concerning the nature of embryos and the ethics of ‘in vitro’ fertilization (IVF)[ii].

This led to another friend reminding us of a story from 1979 in nearby Newport that was covered extensively in local news. We were living in Maine at the time and were unaware of the tragedy. A woman she knows well was rear ended in her car. She survived, but her baby was killed. The baby was still in utero, and the mom was within a few days of her due date nine months into her pregnancy. The controversy ensued when the devastated woman pursued the case as a wrongful death caused by vehicular homicide. After a wrenching public trial, the driver of the other car that caused the death was found innocent of that charge, not because he didn’t cause the accident, but because the baby in the mom’s womb according to the court did not meet the requirements to be protected as a human being.

At issue in both controversies is “when does a human being qualify as a human being deserving of the protection of law all of us enjoy and count upon?” Science is clear and uncontroversial in every embryology textbook in every medical school: at conception, a new human is created, with a complete genome unique in all of history. When the sperm’s DNA merges with the DNA of the egg, the resulting zygote contains within itself all that is necessary to produce first the zygote, then the blastocyst, then the embryo, then the baby (or fetus, which just means ‘little one’.)[iii] Thus is initiated the biological wonder of an unbroken continuum that does not cease maturing for the rest of her life.[iv]

Viability means “ability to live,” the root of which, derives from the Latin “vita,” which means life. “Vita” is the same root of many other English words like “vital,” vivacious,” “vitamin,” “revive,” and “survive.” The connotation ascribed to viability in a fetus is one that can survive outside the womb. This connotation is arbitrary as a legal status. No newborn infant can long survive without continued nurture and protection, a fact well known in ancient Rome where unwelcome or imperfect infants were exposed on a rock to die. An infant is viable, so is the preborn baby.  So is the zygote, the blastocyst, and the embryo – viable within the protection and nurture of a woman’s womb – but viable, nonetheless. The continuum of every life, if uninterrupted by disease or mishap or violence is built into the first instant of the creation of the new genome and cell.

Viability outside the womb is the line many have decided to draw concerning when a fetus is a human, a line coming increasingly earlier in a pregnancy.  A baby born at 22 weeks gestation or 18 weeks early at 14 ounces has survived birth and prospered[v] into toddlerhood. Why not make heartbeat or the pulsing of heart tissue the standard? Or implantation of the placenta in the wall of the uterus? Or “quickening?”  Or birth? Or, as some have proposed, such as Dr. Peter Singer, three months after birth? All have their merits and devotees. For that matter, why is vivaciousness off the table? We all like cute babies. Maybe only cute babies are human?  

The whole debate is arbitrary, a philosophical and ethical debate, not a scientific question, which is asked and answered by the science of embryology. Advancing technology has provided another compelling proof, the visual, emotional confirmation of ultrasound images, which have in many ways changed the discussion. No one ever looked at the live images of a developing human being in their womb and thought, “This is a fetus made up of ‘meat Legos’** or an undifferentiated clump of tissue with which (because I have the power), I can do anything I want.” No, no – they put the images up on their refrigerator with magnets in wonder and joy. This is my baby.

The debate grows ever more bitter and emotional, and no court decision or legislation is going to settle the matter definitively. The public debate is mirrored internally in every human heart and mind, and it is there it will be settled for society. But there is an objective truth with which every conscience must contend. And everyone knows it.

“I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.” Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”

Human beings don’t have reproductive systems: we each have half a reproductive system. One half of humans are female. One half are male. Science informs us in the instant a human sperm enters a human egg, there is a flash of light, and in 2016, a lab in Northwestern University filmed it, something to do with the zinc released from the egg.[vi] That flash occurs once in every human life and signals the very beginning of a life that a few hours later when the DNA merges contains all the genetic information necessary to create and develop our mature form. Every tiny increment along our way is human life.

An old series of memes tells us that no one has ever been heard to say on their deathbed that they wished they had spent more time at work (or watching television or death scrolling TikTok). I suggest as an analogue a series of questions each one of us will ask. Or should.

• Do we want to treat life as a commodity to be frozen, collected, and selected for gender or eye color or possible defect? Or is it our obligation to respect the embryo as a unique and natural to be expected consequence of the total self-giving and loving act between a man and a woman committed for life to one another?[vii] Between a lab or a wedding bed?
• In the case of abortion, do we choose a nursery or a medical waste bucket? A swaddling cloth or stainless steel? Nurture or disposal?
• Do we want to objectify human life or treasure it as precious?
• Do we want to base our decisions on fear, pure self intersest, and despair or hope, self sacrifice, and love?
• Do we want to be givers of life or bringers of death?

In this context, where do we, (you and I), draw the line between when life is cherished, protected, and nurtured and when it can be discarded as imperfect, too expensive, too frightening, too disruptive, too damn inconvenient?  

Where do you draw the line?  Where do you come down – at how many weeks gestation or stage of development along the continuum? Then each of us needs to justify that position and understand why we hold it.

For me, the known science is sufficient. Not what the social and entertainment media and our culture inculcate in us, but what reason and conscience tells us is true.

It seems to me these are important questions. Not to be given a cursory dismissal with a cutesy, superficially clever meme, trivializing what is solemnly important and redefining anthropology – what it means to be a human being. We owe to ourselves an honest appraisal of what we believe, and why.

“I became a physician in order to help save lives. I am at once a physician, a citizen, and a woman, and I am not willing to stand aside and allow the concept of expendable human lives to turn this great land of ours into just another exclusive reservation where only the perfect, the privileged, and the planned have the right to live.”  Dr. Mildred Jefferson, mentor and much missed friend.

 

** “Meat legos” is a creative term from Mary Harrington’s blog and her post here in the Reactionary Feminist. She coined the descriptive “meat Legos matrix” as a name for that aspect of our destructive  postmodern culture of radical self invention wherein we harbor an unjustified or delusional optimism that through technology we can enjoy complete freedom to be almost anything, including treating our bodies as disembodied objects of our imagination. The term has gained great currency in the two years since she invented it. “Meat Legos” graphically recognizes an unprecendented shift in human anthropology uhheard of for all of history and calls into question all our basic assumptions about what a human being is, what our purpose is, and the nature of the mind/body synthesis. 

 

[i] The meme is wrong on many levels. One of them is that an egg or a chicken is not a human being, which is profoundly different. A non-fertilized egg is breakfast. A fertilized egg is a future Sunday dinner.

[ii] The case was a wrongful death civil suit filed by a couple who had preserved frozen “spare” embryos at the IVF clinic they had used. The embryos were destroyed by another disturbed patient who broke into the clinic’s freezer and pulled out a handful produced by the couple who sued him. Burning his hand on the cryogenically frozen embryos, he dropped them, and they were killed. The court found that frozen embryos were human and qualified the case as a wrongful death suit and negligent homicide. The case was not about whether IVF was licit, but about the nature of a human embryo.

[iii] “The best single sperm moves inside the egg and a zygote is formed,” says Dr. Richlin. The zygote phase lasts for around four days; it eventually turns into a blastocyst, and then an embryo.” (From: https://www.parents.com/what-is-a-zygote-7112279#)

[iv] Excellent animated video on fetal development from fertilization to birth: https://babyolivia.liveaction.org/ or some more detailed information here:  https://www.britannica.com/video/192622/Human-embryonic-development-birth-fertilization

[v] One of several articles about this baby: https://www.businessinsider.com/baby-born-at-22-weeks-weighed-14-ounces-2022-8#

[vi] https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-just-captured-the-actual-flash-of-light-that-sparks-when-sperm-meets-an-egg

[vii] What is the nature of the act? What is its telos or purpose? Unitive and procreative or purely recreational?  Should a pro choice understanding come earlier in the proceedings? Is there a responsibility in choosing to participate in the baby making act?