Next month, Mississippi voters will be asked to redefine the word “person” in the state constitution as including “every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.” Supporters say this new “personhood” language defends the constitutional right to life for all persons, including a baby in the womb. Opponents say the new language not only will criminalize all abortions, but could also ban birth control and in-vitro fertilization.

What’s your view? Is this a political issue, a legal issue, a medical issue and/or a faith issue? Can/should government define a ‘person’ or ‘personhood’?

Since the legislation in question has human embryos in view, the fundamental question to answer here—the question we usher to the front of the line before answering any other—is this: What is a human embryo? This is forthrightly a question for science to answer, for science tells us what an embryo is. Philosophy then reasons what can or cannot be done with the embryo based on what it actually is. For those who want to explore this matter, I commend a 2008 book, coauthored by professors Robert P. George (Princeton Univ. and member of the President’s Council on Bioethics) and Christopher Tollefsen (Univ. of South Carolina), entitled Embryo: A Defense of Human Life. The book readably presents the science, ethics, and politics of embryology.

“Here, then, is the bottom line: A human embryo is not something different in kind from a human being, like a rock, or a potato, or a rhinoceros. A human embryo is a whole living member of the species Homo sapiens in the earliest stage of his or her natural development. Unless severely damaged or denied or deprived of a suitable environment, an embryonic human being will, by directing its own integral organic functioning, develop himself or herself to the next more mature developmental stage, i.e., the fetal stage. The embryonic, fetal, child, and adolescent stages are just that—stages in the development of a determinate and enduring entity—a human being—who comes into existence as a single-celled organism (a zygote) and develops, if all goes well, into adulthood many years later” (George and Tollefsen, pp. 50-51).

The authors go on to address the human identity and dignity of embryos produced via human cloning and in vitro fertilization as well. If the human embryo is a human being, albeit developmentally immature, then human rights and protections should be afforded him or her. If the human embryo is something other than a human being, then personhood is not an inherent possession at fertilization but has more to do with developmental maturity and functionality.

In our society, we are awed by our own technological innovations and super-capacities. But capacity can turn to rapacity without moral reflection. Too many believe that moral reflection needlessly slows the pace of technological advancement, in particular in the possibilities of biotechnology. This is not new. As Harry Bruinius shows in Better for All the World, the social disaster that was the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century was trumpeted initially as biotechnology at its most cutting edge. But states eventually scoured from their books their old eugenically-influenced sterilization laws. Moral reflection revealed (and repealed) the “promise of” eugenics to be a threat to the most vulnerable of society and fundamentally dehumanizing.

And so, with that in our history, I’m thankful state governments like Mississippi and Ohio are being proactive in recognizing and protecting the full humanity/personhood of embryonic human beings. A vital role of government is to protect its citizenry (this is even a biblically prescribed role; see Rom. 13), especially the most vulnerable members of society. We consider governments that don’t or won’t—governments which neglect or exploit or turn on their own people—unjust. Valuing human life at its earliest stages for its own intrinsic humanness is problematic to those who value that stage of human development more for its therapeutic potential in the treatment of disease and/or the interests of bioengineering (“designer kids”).

G. K. Chesterton warned that we shouldn’t take down fences until we first know why the fence was put there. The same goes for fence-building—don’t erect one until you first know why it is needed. Because human beings at their embryonic stage of development are particularly vulnerable to disposable utilitarianism, government is right to protect their personhood with this fence of legislation.

Next month, Mississippi voters will be asked to redefine the word “person” in the state constitution as including “every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.” Supporters say this new “personhood” language defends the constitutional right to life for all persons, including a baby in the womb. Opponents say the new language not only will criminalize all abortions, but could also ban birth control and in-vitro fertilization.

What’s your view? Is this a political issue, a legal issue, a medical issue and/or a faith issue? Can/should government define a ‘person’ or ‘personhood’?

The underlying issue of the “personhood” movement is abortion. And while it has political, legal, and medical ramifications, it’s fundamentally an issue of faith for me, especially with the echo effect of biblical texts like Genesis 1:27: So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

Psalm 8:3-5: ³When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; ⁴what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?

⁵Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor.

and Jeremiah 1:5: Before I formed you in the womb I knew you…

I sympathize with those behind the redefinition of “person” to prevent abortions. I, too, find the expulsion of a developing human unacceptable.

That said, I’m uncomfortable with a legal definition that would force a black-and-white view on an issue that can be gray. For instance, would abortion as a last resort to save a pregnant mother’s life still be a criminal act? That’s one example that should give proponents of a definition criminalizing all abortions pause.

Next month, Mississippi voters will be asked to redefine the word “person” in the state constitution as including “every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.” Supporters say this new “personhood” language defends the constitutional right to life for all persons, including a baby in the womb. Opponents say the new language not only will criminalize all abortions, but could also ban birth control and in-vitro fertilization.

What’s your view? Is this a political issue, a legal issue, a medical issue and/or a faith issue? Can/should government define a ‘person’ or ‘personhood’?

What is a “person”?  Certain legislators in Mississippi believe they have the answer:  a “person” means “every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.”  Their intent is clearly to make into law an understanding of person that has animated much of the so-called “pro-life” movement.

However, this position has metaphysical difficulties.  For example, I am curious as to how these legislators would respond to the metaphysical question posed by twinning.  In twinning there is one fertilized egg that splits and thus creates two distinct beings known as identical twins.  If a person is present at the moment of fertilization, how do we end up with two persons?  It is metaphysically impossible to split a soul since a soul is not material.

I also wonder how they might respond to the metaphysical question posed by the number of fertilized eggs that never implant in the uterine wall.  Studies suggest that at a minimum two-thirds of all human eggs fertilized during normal conception fail to implant by the end of the first week.  Some estimates go as high as sixty to eighty percent of fertilized eggs fail to implant and as many as one third of those that do implant later miscarry.  This seems to be a stunning number of “persons” who never make it past the first week or so of life.  If all fertilized eggs are “persons” then who is responsible for this mass murdering?

Thomas Aquinas, admittedly working with the rather rudimentary science of the Middle Ages, perhaps had a better metaphysics than these Mississippi legislators.  Aquinas suggested that a soul is “infused” into the developing body at the time when that body begins to look human.  In fact, the word “conception” has a medieval etymology.  According to Harvard biologist John Biggers, the word “conception,” can be traced to the Latin root “capio” which means to grasp, take hold, or receive into the body.  Thus the medieval understanding of conception likely referred to when an embryo survived and was implanted, not the moment of fertilization.

The legislators in Mississippi who are proposing to define person from the moment of conception would probably prefer to not be bothered by such history.  But this history reflects the metaphysical problems associated with the defining of person at the moment of fertilization.

Instead of focusing on making this particular definition of personhood into law, legislators could better spend their time and energy on crafting legislation that addresses more tangible realities.  For example, perhaps the legislators in Mississippi could focus on making health care available to pregnant women and to children.  Or perhaps they could craft laws providing both men and women legal protections for taking time off from work to care for their children.  Or perhaps they could focus creating jobs and supporting education, both of which might help in reducing the poverty rate in Mississippi which is the highest in the nation.  Or perhaps they could work on reducing the number of women murdered in Mississippi (only one other state has a higher rate of domestic homicide against women).  Any or all of these would be tasks appropriate to a government and to legislators.  All of these tasks would do more to promote the dignity of human life than metaphysically misguided efforts to define personhood at the moment of conception.