My Keloland colleague Cory Heidelberger has an excellent post on his conversations with a Catholic friend who disagrees with him on abortion. This is the punchline:
I'm glad this friend and I remain on speaking terms. I want her around to remind me of the very high moral bar she sets... for all of us.
I agree with Cory that it is hard to have a friendly debate about this topic because there is a lot at stake. But he clearly recognizes the decency of someone on the other side, and that is a good example for all of us.
I would add something: both the pro-choice and the pro-life side begin from the same set of principles: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. However difficult the passions may be, this is a family affair. If we were not, at heart, attached to the same principles, we couldn't have this disagreement. It might help to remember that.
I received a thoughtful and interesting reply to my last post on the beginning of life. In that post, I said this:
Consider this question: what color was Sherlock Holmes hair? I do not remember if Arthur Conan Doyle ever answered that question, but he could have answered it any way he liked because Holmes did not really exist. I do exist, and so does Professor Schaff and his anonymous interlocutor. And even if all three of us were died orange or shaved bald, we would still be blond or brunet or what have you because our hair color depends on our genes not on our appearance. Now: when did the question of my hair color first have an answer? It was at the moment of my conception, when my mother's and father's genes were sorted out to produce a unique cell, with all the genetic information and the machinery to develop into fully functioning adult in time.
My reader replies:
I do not claim to be a biology expert, but I do not think this is quite
right. I wouldn't argue your specific point of human hair color, but I am
not sure that you can extrapolate from that single physical attribute that
personhood is set at conception. Although genes are inherited, their
expression occurs throughout embryo development (epigenesis). Some genes
(and the attributes they represent) are expressed differently as the embryo
develops.An example of this effect in biology is cat hair coloring. Cloned cats (yes,
there is a company that does this at $50,000 a pop) do not look the same.
Calico patterns, even with the same genes, appear different due to some
randomness in gene expression during embryo development. I have also read of
identical human twins that likewise have physical variations (shoe size, for
example).Now if you consider personhood to include behavioral, as well as physical
attributes, I would be hard-pressed to say definitively that personhood
occurs at conception. Even if you were to believe that an individual's
personality was 100% genetic, the expression of that genetic blueprint would
not be set at conception.
I emphatically agree that many basic biological traits are not fixed at conception. My point was a general one, that many questions about an individual are surely answered from conception, and that they are answered about a specific biological organism with his or her own genetic code, distinct from the mother. So someone, some creature existed, with a certain hair color and/or other permanent characteristics, from the moment of my conception. And if it was not me, who was it?
An individual human being has a beginning and an end. The end can be notoriously fuzzy in certain cases: when the higher brain functions cease, when the personality disintegrates, etc. If a person is brain dead, does turning off the machine amount to killing him? Those are serious questions.
I just don't think the same thing is true of the beginning of life. If that first complete cell had perished, that cell to which all the cells of my body trace their ancestry, that would have been the end of this person. So I think that logic does indeed fix the beginning of personhood at conception.
I am grateful to my e-mail interlocutor for his note.
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