In the Beginning

American conservatism has been pretty much reduced to three issues: low taxes for the rich, gay marriage, and abortion. Only the last of these looks to me to have any moral traction.

A favorite "trick question" for the right-to-life crowd is "when does life begin?" Strictly speaking, the question doesn't make sense. Life didn't begin any time recently. Everything alive today is descended in an unbroken chain of living cells from life that began more than three billion years ago. The point, however, is still a good one: when do human rights first attach to developing human life?

Early pro-choice answers were quite absurd, for example the rather silly notion that a fetus was merely a disposable part of a woman's body, like a fingernail, until birth. The favorite answer of the pro-lifers, that the moment of conception is that point seems only slightly less ridiculous to me, but it makes a certain amount of sense in that that moment represents the distinct point at which a new genetic individual comes into being.

For the believers, I suppose, that moment represents the most convenient time to imagine the great spirit sprinkling the magic pixie dust that inserts the ghost into the new machine. The testimony of science suggests that the whole idea of the ghost in the machine - of Cartesian dualism - is misguided, and that mind is an emergent phenomenon in and of the machinery of life. If one takes that seriously, it seems most natural to assume that humaness, to the extent that there is such a thing, develops gradually. Mind develops with brain, and human rights should develop with mind and brain.

That point of view offers no easy answer those who might want a bright line in the sand. I personally find it hard to associate much special human nature with an as yet heartless and brainless blob of cells that though potentially destined to be a human being, is still rather hard to distinguish from quite similar blobs destined to be snakes, frogs, or starfish.

On the other hand, I find the notion of harvesting organs for transplantation from fetuses, as some now contemplate, beyond creepy. William Saletan quotes:

Calling for studies into the feasibility of transplanting foetal organs, Sir Richard, an advisor to Britain's fertility watchdog and the Royal Society, said he was surprised the possibility had not been considered, and that experiments in mice have shown that foetal kidneys grow extremely quickly when transplanted to adult animals. Sir Richard said: "It is probably a more realistic technique in dealing with the shortage of kidney donors than others."

Once upon a time, a then fellow student of mine suggested that abortion should be completely legal up to a certain stage, with a gradually increasing penalty applying from then on as birth approached. Perhaps if abortion had been legalized by legislative negotiation rather that judicial fiat, something like that might have arisen.