Ethics & Public Policy

Essays by Harry T. Cook

August 1, 2008

By Harry T. Cook

Come November voters in Colorado will be asked to cast ballots for or against the idea that a fertilized human egg is a "person." By her own admission, a leader of Colorado Right to Life says the referendum is "the only way we're going to stop abortion." It would also severely limit embryonic stem-cell research. Even though fertilized embryos (or blastocysts) from which stem-cells are taken accumulate in fertility clinics and, if not used, are eventually discarded, the Colorado law would prevent their use in research for the purpose of saving human life - but not their discarding. If passed, the so-called "The Human Life Amendment" would enshrine in Colorado's constitution a scientific "fact" that no scientist worthy of the name would consider a "fact." Facts are not made or arrived at by fiat. By contrast, voters in Michigan will see on their ballots this November a measure that, if passed, would repeal and amend some of the medieval statutes now on the books, which make it a 10-year felony to conduct embryonic stem-cell research. God said, it is said, fiat lux et facta est lux (roughly, "let there be light and light became a fact"), but I don't think human beings get to do that, and certainly not by the blunderbuss means of constitutional referenda. While democracy, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, is the worst of all political systems except all the others, democracy is not democratic when it is used to disguise ad hominem and specious arguments. Let us say it: Scientific facts (and scientists are very careful about the word "facts") are not established by majority vote. They are arrived at by excruciatingly difficult gathering of relevant data, their sifting and organization, the setting forth of hypotheses followed by exhaustive testing until the hypotheses appear to be the best available explanations for the phenomena in question. The question of when an entity composed of tissue becomes a "person" is not testable. Theologians will opine; philosophers may muse; ethicists may venture propositions. Science, however, cannot make such a determination. The English word "person" is a derivative of the Greek prosōpon meaning "face" and of the Latin persona meaning "actor's mask" or "character." Therefore, "person" means recognizable individual - recognizable by face and other characteristics that set one apart from others and thereby make him or her a unique individual. It's pretty clear that the biological reality of a fertilized egg is unrecognizable as a person, though, of course, it has the potential of becoming a one. A "person," of course, is much more than a face. One is in part the outcome of his or her genetic possibilities, to whatever degree they can be realized. One is also a product of his or her environment, parenting and social maturation. Those are the things that make a "person," not the conjunction of the sperm and the egg. That's the reality of the matter, but voters tend to embrace myths rather than reality - so says journalist Rick Shenkman whose recent book Just How Stupid Are We? strikes a telling blow against the clueless voter - the kind that the Colorado referendistas are aiming to gull. Shenkman shows that the myths of Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction and being in league with al-Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks built support among American voters for the Iraq war long after those myths were debunked. Shenkman is more wont to blame the gullible voter than the myth-makers themselves for this idiocy run amok. He should only read the polls where religious matters are concerned. More than three quarters of all Americans believe in a god who rewards and punishes with heaven and hell. About that same number and maybe even more believe, against all data to the contrary, that there is an after-life. Nearly the same number believes that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead. Close to that number believe that Darwin was wrong and the Bible is right about the origins of life. Mass movements, wrote Eric Hoffer, strive to impose a fact-proof screen between the faithful and the realities of the world . . . To rely on the evidence of the senses is heresy. Hoffer realized that myths are clung to because they dovetail well with sentimentalities. For instance, a couple truly in love and desiring to have children may embrace the notion that his sperm and her egg, as a result of a passionate time in the bedroom, have by virtue of their act become at that moment their own son or daughter. They may not stop to think that the bull and the cow, the stud and the mare - their distant mammalian cousins - go through the same motions that yield the raw material for next year's hamburger or, perhaps, the following year's Kentucky Derby winner. Mythology is all well and good when expressed in music, painting, sculpture, drama, poetry and soaring hymnody, but it is, in the end, myth and not reality. Myths are spun out of emotional gossamer. Facts appear in the course of events and must be dealt with in real ways.

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© Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.