Bright Line of the Embryo

William Saletan, author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War, reviews Embryo: A Defense of Human Life by Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen in the New York Times. In it, he writes:

The authors think a clear line can be drawn between eggs, which are parts of organisms, and embryos, which are wholes. Eggs must combine with sperm or die, they write, and an organism “was never itself a sperm cell or an ovum.” But science tells another story. In some 70 vertebrate species, unfertilized eggs have developed into offspring. A United States government report documents dozens of mature turkeys that were never fathered. This, too, is part of life’s program. Scientists call it “reproductive plasticity.” In some species, they theorize, it’s designed to pass on genes when no mates are available. If the egg-embryo distinction gets in the way, nature suspends it.

Technology further muddles the embryo’s boundaries. In vitro fertilization separates the internal and external portions of the embryonic program. Cloning turns adult body cells into embryos. Direct reprogramming turns body cells into embryonic stem cells. Aggregation turns embryonic mouse stem cells into mice.

It seems to me that his counters have flaws. George and Tollefsen are writing about human beings as a species, and not turkeys or other animals. Second, it is man's technology that is muddling the picture, which would otherwise not be muddled. So that's a strike against some of the technological "advances"--the monkeying around we're doing. Couldn't you just as well argue that sex isn't so clearly defined as we think if you start genetically altering men and women to confuse the matter? I mean, you could theoretically use techology to do all sorts of things, but would that mean there is no longer a given nature or pattern to be respected? Well, apparently it would, by these lights, because the underlying premise of many of our secular modern scientists is that there is no such things as a given human nature and we can darn well do whatever we want, if we can just figure out how. Hence, human-animal hybrids.

Saletan does say that the book, Embryo, has an

essential and timely message. Of all the lines we could draw in human development to mark the onset of moral worth, conception is the brightest. But that line is no more absolute in ethics than in science. We should never create or destroy embryos lightly.

It takes imagination to grasp the moral value of a tiny dot of cells. A moral imagination. But it's the moral imagination that human beings have that makes us of a higher order, higher than beasts. But that's the idea contested: We are beasts and our imaginations are simply the product of biological evolution? No moral purpose can be presuppsosed.

It is imagination that helps drive science and human achievement (and degradation). Why place it to the side when it comes to upholding the sanctity of all human life?