Abortion Under the Microscope

A young woman stared somberly at passersby from flyers posted on walls and bulletin boards across campus last week. With chiding eyes, she asked us whether she deserved the death sentence that we, society, had given her. Her full lips rebuked us, and her flaxen locks seemed to shine with lost potential. Then she delivered her punch line: She had been conceived through rape, and her “death penalty” was an abortion, one that society would have permitted to take place. Her message was clear: Abortions, regardless of the means of conception, are murder.

Initially, stunned pedestrians may have wondered when this woman had time to develop such charmingly attractive features in utero. However, upon seeing that she was the brainchild of the perennially embryo-anthropomorphizing students of Harvard Right to Life, onlookers quickly grasped the more metaphorical nature of her message: A life is a life, whether embryo or adult, and any destruction of an embryo is thus no different from capital punishment.

Many liberals decry the idea that life begins at conception, and many conservatives champion it. Both sides, however, tend to agree that the question of when a human becomes a human eventually strays from the territory of rational argument into the realm of spirituality.

But this philosophical dead end misses the more important and more practical question: Should an early-stage embryo, such as one conceived through rape, have the same standing in society as an adult? Fortunately, this problem is far more easily resolved, with the help of a few critical but shockingly under-mentioned scientific truths. Indeed, if an embryo and an adult are equivalent, as the Harvard Right to Life posters seem to propose, then any rational system of social ethics will degenerate into absurdity.

The basic fact is that life simply is not as miraculous as we choose to deem it. According to University of Utah Professor of Pediatrics, Human Genetics, and Obstetrics and Gynecology John M. Opitz in his 2003 testimony to the President’s Council on Bioethics, 60 to 80 percent of embryos (i.e. unique fusions of genes from mother and father that encode distinct human beings) simply never develop further. They are either flushed out of the mother’s system without implanting into the uterine wall or are voided because of chromosomal abnormalities. Of this immense number of failed embryos, roughly half do not have gross genetic errors, and in fact carry the information for the creation of a viable human being. But they simply do not continue to exist, and their characteristic combination of genes, which will never again be formed in quite the same way, is lost.

Thus, if conception is the moment at which a human being is formed, and if an early-stage embryo is an entity capable of receiving a “death penalty,” then a slaughter of mass proportions is taking place and has been since the dawn of man. Some may try to write this atrocity off as “natural”; death of adults, however, is equally natural, but we give it enormous significance within our society. Where, then, are the funerals for these billions of lost souls, whose only crime was being created through the brutally stochastic act of procreation?

They are, of course, nonexistent. We feel no empathy for embryos in this context and see no need to assign to them any conception of death or dying. Yet, in a parallel context, such as if a rape victim is given a drug to prevent embryo implantation, people suddenly introduce the notion of “killing” a child. What causes this leap of logic?

One possibility is that people consider abortion to be under human control, while natural termination of embryos is deemed unavoidable. However, this notion is seriously flawed. If an embryo does in fact have standing as a living being, then the natural conclusion is that the wanton destruction of life caused by procreation must be ceased immediately. After all, one cannot make exceptions to murder just because they are “necessary.” On what moral grounds can we destroy three inarguably unique human beings, on average, in order to make one? This “take life to make life” ethic is tenuous at best, but more importantly, it is precisely what the right to life movement openly decries in its opposition to stem cell research.

As a result, we are left with two options. If we wish to maintain a moral society, we must in effect drive ourselves extinct to avoid the death of innocent embryos, or we must dismiss the idea that conception is the point at which a life legally begins. One imagines that the second course of action is easier to accept, or at least to pass through Congress.

While this argument cannot, of course, be extrapolated to the debate over how to treat post-implantation embryos, the conclusion is nonetheless extremely relevant socially. For example, it shows that rape victims’ decisions to prevent embryo implantation are perfectly acceptable ethically, and can in no way be compared to the “death penalty.”

Moreover, this argument has much broader potential consequences, because, according to the Guttmacher Institute’s studies of worldwide abortion rates, only a small fraction of abortions occur despite consistent birth control use (i.e. the pregnancies come as a complete surprise to the women involved). Thus, only these abortions cannot be prevented by morally acceptable methods such as steady contraception or, in emergency cases, implantation-preventing medication. And, as reproductive science continues to improve, both in the detection and control of fertilization, these remaining ethical concerns surrounding unwanted pregnancy may soon cease to exist altogether.



Michael Segal ’09 is a biochemical sciences concentrator in Cabot House.