The Alabama supreme court’s decision classifying embryos created by in vitro fertilization as “extrauterine children” requires me to revisit this subject and repeat myself, hopefully with more clarity.
I’ve written before that the creation and freezing of embryos in IVF clinics has revealed to us a heretofore unseen and unknown stage of proto-human life: “people seeds.”
I mean that literally. A seed is an embryo with a food supply that is in a state of suspended animation, of potential growth and development, that is not activated unless and until that seed finds itself in a favorable environment.
In plants and trees, nature creates and “wastes” millions of seeds so that some may take root and grow. Which ones fulfill their design is partly a matter of chance—where the wind takes them, whether there’s a drought that season—and partly of fitness.
What IVF has revealed is that this stage exists in mammalian, and therefore human, life too, but hidden and brief. (Freezing embryos stops time at this stage so we can see it.) A fertilized egg is a “people seed” for 5–7 days, during which it develops (or fails to develop) to the “blastocyst” stage, when it is ready to implant in the lining of a uterus. It must then “take root” in a hospitable environment in order to grow into a human being.
It is estimated that under natural conditions, from 25% to as many as 50% of fertilized eggs never do implant, for reasons partly of chance and partly of fitness.
This strongly suggests that a human life begins at implantation, not at fertilization. It requires a “handshake signal” between an embryo and a woman’s body to become not just potential life, but actual life. Otherwise, if you are a religious believer, you’d have to admit that God Himself kills up to half of the human lives He creates, for whatever unaccountable reason. (Souls too precious to be sullied by this world?)
If you don’t believe human choice or circumstances should play a part in this equation, then you don’t use birth control or IVF. But to say that every fertilized egg is a child … well, for one thing, it plays right into the hands of those who would write women out of the equation and gestate fetuses in machines.
Every fertilized egg is a unique potential child, but many of those will never come to fruition, without you lifting a finger. No child begins to exist until a mother, at least physiologically, consents to it. This creates political problems of its own, of course, but it also opens up a zone of choice without anything a zealot can defensibly call murder.
(Where do I stand on abortion? Women have always used it, far more often out of desperation than caprice. It cannot be banned, only driven underground where it is more dangerous. It should be federally legal up to a debatable gestational age, with firm exceptions. In my view [having had one] it’s a sad and violent act, like killing in war, that is unavoidable to accept [within limits we struggle to set] but unseemly to celebrate.)
Thank you. Spot on.