Coming Home

Perhaps if the Justices in Ireland had read George and Tollefsen’s monumental, yet very readable work, Embryo: A defense of Human Life, they would have avoided handing down their recent catastrophic decision.

In ruling that human embryos are not human persons, the justices have decided that personhood is not an essential, intrinsic attribute of being, but rather an accidental attribute that comes and goes based upon some arbitrary criteria. This mistake now takes Ireland one very long step down the road toward more liberalized laws on abortion, euthanasia, and physician-assisted suicide. The rest of the story here.

In the particular case before them, parental rights over frozen embryos, the true horror of in vitro fertilization manifests itself. Parents treat their offspring as mere property, to be disposed of at whim. This happens way before they get to the stage of storing the ‘leftovers’ in liquid nitrogen. The process of embryo sorting, looking for the most fit, occurs right after fertilization. In order to accomplish this, the embryo needs to defined out of the human family.

Medical textbooks used to define pregnancy as beginning with fertilization. To accommodate the abortafacient reality of the birth control pill and to accommodate IVF, the definition has been changed to pregnancy defined by implantation. Changing definitions does not change objective reality, but it does clear the way for big business.

The truth is that good parents do all within their power to facilitate each of their children’s growth and development. Liquid nitrogen cold storage is the greatest of all molestations. Winnowing the offspring for keepers is extreme narcissism, if not downright diabolical. But as human history teaches, once one is defined out of the human family, anything goes.