ROSENBERG: What rights does a fetus have?
ARKES: On what grounds would one consider a child in the womb as anything less than a human being? Doesn’t speak yet: neither do deaf-mutes. Doesn’t have arms and legs. There are many people who are born without limbs or lose limbs in the course of their lives and they don’t lose anything necessary to their standing as human beings. The fetus certainly wouldn’t have a right to practice law, wouldn’t have the right to use the squash courts, it wouldn’t have the right to a driver’s license. But certain kinds of rights that reside in human beings would not really be variable by height and weight. So the right not to be killed for a casual reason or an insubstantial reason would really not depend on the height or the weight of the baby–or its degrees of articulateness or even consciousness.
Does viability matter?
No, I don’t think so.
Would it be inconsistent to say that a fetus could be a crime victim but abortion is legal?
Not particularly. If the abortion were done not with the intention of destroying the child but with the intention of saving the mother, if we could say that the abortion were justified, then we wouldn’t say that the fetus was the victim of a wrong.
What should be done with frozen embryos in IVF clinics?
To the extent it’s practicable, we ought to arrange for the adoption of these embryos by people who are willing to gestate them. If not, then they perish. The question is whether anyone should have a veto, or whether the law itself should contain a preference for life.
So you’re saying the embryo could be implanted without the natural parents’ consent?
Sure. The embryo doesn’t encumber any longer the body of the woman. She’s not being affected by it. It doesn’t encumber her interests because she doesn’t have to deal with an unwanted pregnancy. There’s a tricky question here as to whether the natural parents can have property rights. The law doesn’t ascribe property rights to bodies.
Can embryos be adopted?
The laws are mixed on this one. If these are human entities and they’re adrift out there somewhere, they’re abandoned, you can argue that we should be treating them with the same perspective we bring to other abandoned human beings.
So it’s not OK to donate them to medical research?
Not any more than it would be OK for people to donate their own born children to medical research.
Is cloning OK for research or reproduction?
The matter of cloning for reproduction may actually be more arguably OK, though I have a strong aversion to it. But the case against so-called therapeutic cloning, cloning for research, could raise even greater moral questions. Would you allow parents to commit the bodies of their children [to research] without the consent of those children? Or sell the body parts of their children–not for any procedure involving the treatment of the child or the well-being of their own child, but for some speculative gain or benefit that could accrue to some other children or some other generation?
So when does life begin?
The leading textbooks on embryology say it’s the union of two gametes, a male gamete or spermatozoon and a female gamete or mature ovum. You can phrase it in different ways, but on the medical side there is no dissent on this matter. What we find is that people are not arguing over the science, they’re arguing over the social definition of a human being. People throw in all these other attributes–it has to be alert, and articulate. Well, many of those things aren’t manifest in a newborn child. He’s not snapping off witty sentences. He’s not doing syllogisms. But we know that the capacity for it is there. If we know that about the child, we know that about the zygote or the embryo.
