Location, Location, Location
By Christopher O. Tollefsen, Public Discourse:
Location is simply one more of those many factors that make no difference where the most foundational moral principles are concerned. The human embryo is a human being, whether in utero, undergoing cell division in vitro, or temporarily (or permanently) in frozen stasis in a “nursery,” as the Alabama Supreme Court tellingly, but somewhat ironically, calls it.
Sometime in 2007, when Robert P. George and I had agreed to publish Embryo: A Defense of Human Life with Doubleday, our editor, Adam Bellow, got in touch to request a change to the beginning of the book. I no longer have the correspondence but the substance of the complaint was that our opening pages were . . . dry. I am confident that the complaint was just, and can guess that we opened with some abstract claims about justice. That is an occupational hazard for both of us.
In search of something with a bit more zing, I was astonished to come upon the story of Noah Benton Markham. Noah had been among 1,400 cryopreserved embryos whose lives were threatened by Hurricane Katrina, and he was among the lucky ones to be rescued by police officers using flat-bottomed boats. He was born sixteen months after Katrina’s devastation, his name an obvious tribute to his unusual history.
We opened Embryo (later updated in a second edition from the Witherspoon Institute) with Noah’s story in order to make a simple, but essential, point: it was Noah who was rescued by those police officers (combined forces from Illinois and Louisiana). It is true that Noah existed at that time in the very earliest stages of human life, as an embryo; and true also that he existed in a state of suspended animation, cryopreserved in anticipation of the possibility of eventual implantation in his mother’s womb. But, as we noted,
[I]f those officers had never made it to Noah’s hospital, or if they had abandoned those canisters of liquid nitrogen, there can be little doubt that the toll of Katrina would have been fourteen hundred human beings higher than it already was, and Noah, sadly, would have perished before having the opportunity to meet his loving family.
The story of Noah was recalled to my mind in recent days by the announcement that the Alabama Supreme Court had ruled that cryopreserved—frozen—human embryos are to be considered “unborn children” under the 1872 “Wrongful Death of a Minor Act” that “allows parents of a deceased child to recover punitive damages for their child’s death.” That act contained no exception for in vitro embryonic human beings, and the Court thus ruled that the “Wrongful Death of a Minor Act applies to all unborn children, regardless of their location.”
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