Making the Case for Human Life
An interview with Robert P. George

Editor’s Note: The following contains Lay Witness’s full interview with Robert P. George. A brief excerpt was published in the print edition of the magazine. Please note that the correct title of George’s and Tollefsen’s book is Embryo: A Defense of Human Life.

On January 8, Doubleday will release the book Embryo: A Defense of Human Life. Based on the latest in fetal development research and on core principles of moral philosophy, this book by Christopher Tollefsen and Robert P. George aims to help the American public realize the stark truth beyond all the hype about advances in medical treatments and scientific breakthroughs: That human life deserves to be respected, not to be treated as disposable research material.

Christopher Tollefsen is the director of the graduate philosophy program at the University of South Carolina and author of the forthcoming Biomedical Research and Beyond. Robert P. George, a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, is a professor of jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He is author of Making Men Moral, In Defense of Natural Law, and The Clash of Orthodoxies.

Lay Witness interviewed Robert George in November about the roles that science, philosophy, and faith play in making and defending the case for human life.

LW How did Embryo come about? What is its audience, and what new approach does it bring to the table?

RG The question of the moral status of the human embryo has been with us from the time abortion became an issue, since central to that debate is what or whose life is taken in an abortion. Of course, it has been given a new urgency and poignancy by the development of stem cell science and the desire of some practitioners of stem cell science to obtain pluripotent stem cells—that is, stem cells capable of being morphed into different types of body tissue—from living human embryos in ways that involve the killing of the embryo.

Since 2002, I have served on The President’s Council on Bioethics. One of the Council’s first tasks was to consider the moral status of the human embryo as it figures in the debate over the ethics of embryonic stem cell research and cloning. Cloning comes into the picture because one of the ways in which it’s proposed that we obtain embryonic stem cells is by cloning human beings to create cloned human embryos that would then be destroyed to obtain stem cells.

The audience for this particular book is everybody. It is not a book only for specialists, though we hope that even specialists in science and in philosophy will find it interesting and useful. We’re publishing it with a trade publisher—Doubleday—not with a university press precisely because we want the information and arguments that the book contains to be available to the entire public.

At the end of the day, decisions like the question of what our laws should be about abortion and whether we should permit or fund embryonic stem cell research will be made by the American people as a whole. We’re citizens of a democracy. Even where courts have interfered with these decisions—as in the abortion case—at the end of the day, if there is to be any stable resolution, the American people will have to weigh in on the question, even if it means electing presidents who will appoint justices who will revise previous opinions (such as the opinion in Roe vs. Wade) to be more protective of human life.

We want to inform the entire public. We want our arguments to be available to everyone. And we hope that people on both sides of the debate will read the book.

Now, we’re clearly on one side. The title of the book is Embryo, the subtitle is A Defense of Human Life. So that reveals where we stand. But we want to engage folks on the other side, and to do that we want them to consider our arguments and to try to respond to them. If they think we’ve made an error of fact or drawn an unwarranted logical inference from the facts, we would like them to make a counterargument, and then we would be happy to respond to them.

The book brings together the most up-to-date scientific knowledge with philosophical arguments that are drawn from the Western tradition of thought that has informed us not only as a culture, but also as a polity. The principles we appeal to are the principles of the Declaration of Independence—for example, the proposition that each and every member of the human family is created equal and endowed by the Creator with inalienable rights.

So the question becomes, “Who is a member of the human family?” We think that that can be established by science. Science establishes that a human embryo is a human being at a very early stage of development. A human embryo is not something distinct from a human being or different from a human being in the way that an alligator or a rock or a potato is something different from a human being. A human embryo just is a human being very early in its development. Just as each of us who’s now an adult was at an earlier stage of life an adolescent and before that a child and before that an infant, each of us was a fetus and before that an embryo. Each of us developed by a self-directed process; that is, by directing our own integral organic functioning as a biological organism. We developed ourselves from the embryonic into and through the fetal, infant, child, and adolescent stages and ultimately into adulthood with our unity, determinateness, and identity fully intact. This is why it’s true to say, and false to say the contrary, that each of us was once a human embryo just as we were once an adolescent and before that a child. The very same creature that now exists existed as an adolescent and existed as a child and existed as a fetus and existed as an embryo. The terms human “adult,” “adolescent,” “child,” “infant,” and “fetus” refer to stages in the life of a determinate and enduring creature—a human being.

None of us was ever a mere part of another organism. We were never part of our mother. Of course we were carried in our mother’s womb and given birth by her. But we were never a body part of our mother the way a sperm cell or an egg cell is a body part of another human being. When egg and sperm are successfully joined, a new organism comes into existence; but prior to the sperm and egg joining, there is no new organism. The sperm cell or the egg cell is not only genetically but also functionally part of a male or female human being. But once the egg and sperm join and an embryo comes into being, something new exists—a genetically distinct and unique and functionally distinct new organism—that is, a new human being in the embryonic stage.

Now, you’ll notice in all of this there’s no appeal to religion or religious authority at all. We don’t purport to argue from biblical authority or the authority of the tradition of the Church or the authority of the leaders of the Church. Now that reflects not some tactical or strategic judgment on our part. Rather, it reflects our view of how you need to go about answering the questions at hand, which are what is a human embryo and what is its moral status? We don’t think you can just look that up in the Bible, for example. We think the relevant authority here is the authority of science. And it’s science that establishes beyond contradiction that what you have when the embryo comes into being—whether it’s by union of sperm and egg or by cloning, once cloning is perfected—that as soon as you have a new embryo, what you’ve got is a new and distinct human being.

And then the only question becomes, well, as a human being, is it entitled to human rights? And of course, if there are such things as human rights, we possess those rights simply by virtue of our humanity, not by virtue of our race or ethnicity or sex, nor is it by virtue of our age or size or stage of development. We just have these rights as human beings. So applying that basic philosophical principle that every member of the human family deserves respect including the protection of the laws, and combining that with the scientific fact that a human embryo is in fact an embryonic human being, you’ve got the unavoidable conclusion that the human embryo deserves respect—and a kind of respect incompatible with treating it as simply disposable research material.

LW You propose that religion is neither necessary nor sufficient for making the argument against the destruction of human embryos. What role does religion have to play in the pro-life argument? Why is it important that people of faith learn the scientific and philosophical arguments?

RG I think Christians have to understand that very many of our fellow citizens are not Christians, or are not devout Christians, or do not hold an understanding of Christianity that affirms right out of the blocks the moral status of the human embryo. So they deserve to hear the argument for that proposition, and I think it’s incumbent upon Christians to do that—to make that argument in the public square and to appeal to common sources such as reason itself, science, and our basic philosophical stances articulated in the Declaration of Independence.

It simply won’t be persuasive to citizens who don’t accept the authority of the Bible or the authority of the Church that the Bible or the Church says “this is so.” So one reason I think Christians need to learn to make these arguments is that this is the currency of public debate in our culture. And I think it’s good that that’s the case. I think it’s good that we can lay aside our distinctive and different religious beliefs in an area like this and argue on the basis of the philosophy and science—on the basis of reasons that are accessible to all, what are sometimes called “public reasons.”

And number two, I think Christians need to learn this argument so they will be motivated to act for the sake of justice. Even if we don’t appeal to religion to determine whether an embryo is a human being—that’s a scientific question—once we’ve determined that an embryo is a human being, and determined, in view of our commitment to the equal dignity of all human beings (all members of the human family), that the human embryo deserves our respect and protection, I think faith should motivate people to go out there and act for the sake of defending the defenseless, act for the sake of protecting the vulnerable.

Just as it was faith that motivated so many people to exercise leadership roles and to support the civil rights movement and to overcome racial injustice, I think similarly faith should motivate all of us—Christians, Jews, people of other faiths—to act in defense of the vulnerable human embryo who right now is subject to being manipulated and destroyed in biomedical research.

LW In your book, you present a compelling case that human embryos are indeed human beings who deserve moral respect. Your case was certainly well-received by the audience at Franciscan University’s Bioethics Conference in October. What do you see as the greatest obstacles to convincing your opponents?

RG Well, it depends on the opponents. Some opponents are like Peter Singer. They are utilitarians and they believe that any act, no matter how evil it is or seems to be, can be justified if one believes one can produce a greater good by performing the act. Singer believes, for example, that it’s morally acceptable to kill infants to harvest body parts because he doesn’t believe that infants are persons with full dignity, and therefore they don’t weigh very heavily on the scales. And if we can save other people by harvesting their body parts, Singer has said that he doesn’t think there is anything morally wrong with a society that would produce large numbers of infants precisely for the purpose of organ harvesting.

In this utilitarian theory, there is no act that is intrinsically immoral. Raping somebody, even raping a child or even a baby, if that would have among its consequences, for whatever reason, something understood as the greater good—say saving a lot of other people who are being held hostage by a hostage-taker that demands that you commit the rape or else he’ll kill the hostages—this would be justified. Against people like Singer I think it’s very important to make the broader argument against utilitarianism, and I’ve done so in various writings. There are also very valuable writings by John Finnis and Germain Grisez and many other philosophers against utilitarianism.

And then there are writers like Lee Silver—who, like Singer, is a colleague of mine at Princeton—who simply deny that there are scientific grounds for believing that human embryos are whole, living members of the species Homo sapiens, and as such, are human beings. Now, this flies in the face of what every leading embryology and human developmental biology textbook says about embryos. Whether or not they use the phrase “human being,” the major works of human embryology and developmental biology attest that a human embryo is indeed a whole, living member of the species Homo sapiens. There is no way around that fact.

Then there’s someone like my former colleague from the President’s Council on Bioethics, Harvard professor Michael Sandel, who while he believes that human embryos are not mere things, also thinks they’re not yet persons. He thinks that they have a status between persons and things. There, I think it’s important to make the argument to show that there is no such intermediate category. Something or someone is either a person or it’s not a person. And if it’s not a person, it’s a thing. There is no third category. We humans don’t begin as non-persons and then later become persons. We come into being as persons and the only way we cease being persons is by ceasing to be, that is, by dying. If we think about it, it would be monstrous to try to live with the logic of believing that some human beings, some living members of the species of Homo sapiens, are persons and others are not, drawing distinctions between pre-personal human beings (embryos, fetuses, infants) and “persons,” or between post-personal human beings (the demented, those in minimally conscious states) and “persons”—believing that there can be such things as pre-personal or post-personal human beings, or human beings who, because they lack whatever it is Sandel thinks you need in order to be a person, are not now, never were, and never will be persons (e.g., severely retarded individuals).

In the book we give reasons for rejecting all these various sorts of arguments—the utilitarianism of Singer, and the positions of Silver and Sandel and many others.

LW What practical advice can you give to help our readers “go on the offense,” or engage in conversation with those who don’t share their views on this issue?

RG I think that very often, people who want to justify human embryo killing make the false claim that the case for protecting the human embryo depends on a controversial theological theory of “ensoulment.” I don’t think we need to engage that question at all in the debate over the ethics of embryo-killing and the issue of what our public policy toward it should be. The relevant questions are not theological, but are scientific and philosophical. The scientific question is this: “Is the human embryo a whole, living member of the species Homo sapiens?” The answer to that question is plainly “yes.”

Then, once you’ve established that fact and you know that a human embryo is from a scientific point of view a human being, the next question is this: “Do all human beings have dignity and a right to life or only some?” And then we have a philosophical argument.

And here I think that believing that only some human beings have dignity and rights and others don’t is simply untenable. It leads to unacceptable consequences, a kind of denial of human equality that is flatly inconsistent with our nation’s founding principles and, really, what our civilization at its best has always believed and striven to obtain. We haven’t always lived up to it—obviously, during the period of slavery and Jim Crow and segregation we talked a good line about equality but we refused to honor it. We need to make sure we don’t do that again now in the case of human beings in the earliest stages of life or in the later stages of life or who are in mentally or physically handicapped conditions.

LW Once we go down that road . . . ?

RG I think it will be very difficult to go back. I think it’s very important to hold the line because people have a tremendous power to rationalize wrongdoing when they believe it benefits them or it has the potential for benefiting them. So the more we lock ourselves into a system of any type—whether it’s a social system as we had under segregation or a way of doing science—that implicitly or explicitly denies the equal dignity of human beings, our temptation is to entrench ourselves further and to rationalize what we’re doing. And it makes it harder and harder to get out of it. Self-interest tends to reinforce the false moral views on which a system is based. So I think it’s very important that we not go down this road because it will be very hard for us to reverse course if we do, when you have a whole scientific enterprise that’s based on embryo destruction.

LW It seems most people today would agree that abortion is the taking of a human life. This puts us in different territory than we were, say, 30 years ago, when pro-lifers were out to convince the nation that abortion is “baby-killing.” In a society in which human life is often seen as expendable, for whatever reason, are arguments about protecting the universal right to life of every human being really going to make a difference? (And how do we correct that?)

RG Although it’s true we have a very permissive regime of abortion law, as imposed by the Supreme Court in 1973, one thing I think you have to realize is that this country has also sustained an exceptionally vibrant and active pro-life movement. And I think an awful lot of people in this country, especially by comparison to Europe or Japan, really do not want to see abortion continue.

There are obviously divisions in the country over abortion, but there’s a very substantial portion of the public that is opposed to abortion in the vast majority of cases. Now, there are other people who agree that it’s a wrong and a bad thing, and indeed a terrible thing, but don’t think there’s really anything that can be done about it. And I think that they need to be persuaded that there are, in fact, things that can be done about it.

I think the reason that more people today understand that abortion is the taking of human life is pretty straightforward: It’s the sonogram. In 1973, there was no such thing, and so people would claim, “Well, what’s going on inside the mother’s body is nothing that has to do with the presence of a human life. It’s just tissue that somehow later at birth becomes a human life.”

Well, nobody believes that anymore because everybody has seen with their own eyes pictures of children in the womb. Everybody’s first baby pictures now are pictures in the womb, and the babies are often given a name before they’re born. You walk into any young couple’s house, and there on the refrigerator instead of a picture of a baby on a bearskin rug is a sonographic picture of the baby in the womb. Grandparents’ first pictures of their grandchildren are in the womb.

We’re living with a bit of cognitive dissonance right now since there are some people who have those pictures up on their refrigerators and so forth but still want to justify abortion. And that creates a dissonance that people will find it hard to live with. I don’t think it can be sustained over the long run. You can’t look at your unborn child or grandchild and have a name for him or her, yet at the same time hold that on the other hand abortion is OK because “it’s just removing some tissue.”

So I think that’s a very big change that’s come as a result of technological development. Those of us on the pro-life side who really want to work for justice for the unborn and a society in which everybody’s welcomed in life and protected in law have to drive home the point that it’s just intellectually untenable to believe that a baby’s a baby if you want it and is not a baby if you don’t want it.

A baby’s being wanted or not wanted can’t change it from being a baby into something else. Imagine a situation where a woman or a woman and man who conceive a child want the baby and then change their mind and don’t want the baby and then change their mind again and want the baby. The baby didn’t change from being a baby to not being a baby into being a baby again by virtue of peoples’ thoughts or desires.

For more information: George recommended the following reports by The President’s Council on Bioethics: “Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry” (2002), “Reproduction and Responsibility: The Regulation of New Biotechnologies” (2004), and “White Paper: Alternative Sources of Pluripotent Stem Cells” (2005). These are available at www.bioethics.gov.

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