Missing a fact of life

December 1, 2007 By

embryo2 06In a story about the right-to-life movement, reporter Nicholas Riccardi of the Los Angeles Times left readers with the impression that an individual human embryo is not, well, a human:

Antiabortion activists in several states are promoting constitutional amendments that would define life as beginning at conception, which could effectively outlaw all abortions and some birth control methods.

The campaigns to grant “personhood” to fertilized eggs, giving them the same legal protections as human beings, come as the nation in January marks the 35th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion.

The idea that human embryos and fetuses are not human is often repeated in the media. But there’s one problem with it: biologists disagree. In fact, they have reached a consensus on this issue: In the overwhelming number of cases, an individual human life begins at fertilization or conception. (The exception is identical twinning, when an embryo splits and a second human life begins. In that case, the first human life begins at fertilization, and the second when the embryo splits or divides.)

Witness the standard works on this area — Langman’s Medical Embryology, Color Atlas of Clinical Embryology and Developmental Biology.

Perhaps some embryologists disagree that an individual human life begins at conception. But Riccardi does not mention any such scientists. Instead, he relies on the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade:

Ever since abortion was legalized, antiabortion groups have pushed for a federal Human Life Amendment that would define life as beginning at conception. One of the reasons the court gave for legalizing the procedure is that the fetus is not legally a person. Abortion opponents think that by granting human status to embryos they will destroy the legal foundation of the right to abortion.

Riccardi’s characterization of Roe is misleading. In its majority opinion, the Court declined to say when human life starts: “We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.”

Like many reporters, Riccardi has confused biology with philosophy. Scientists agree on when human life begins. So do Christian denominations. What various religions disagree about is what significance that nascent human life has.

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Filed Under: Journalism, Politics, Religion, Science, Social Issues
  • Deacon John M. Bresnahan

    It is clear to all who will look with an open mind that much of the pro-abortion sentiment that shows up in polls is fed by lies, distortion, and fabrication promoted in the mainstream mass media as clearly pointed out here. Even the two women who brought the two court cases that most legalized abortion-on-demand in this country (who are now pro-life) have admitted that they lied under oath (with the urging and connivance of pro-abortion groups–but try to find that info in the MSM in abortion stories) in order to get abortion legalized.

  • http://blog.muchmorethanwords.com/?p=6 gfe

    Rather than dealing with Mark’s thesis, which I’m not so sure of, I’ll make a couple comments on the error and correction in the story.

    First, the error:

    If successful — and upheld by the courts — the amendments could outlaw certain forms of birth control that prevent fertilized eggs from implanting in the uterus, such as the birth control pill or contraceptive sponge.

    How in the world did that ever get past several editors and make it to print? The fact that the statement about contraceptive sponges ended up in the paper shows an alarming lack of knowledge about the basic operation of the human reproductive system. It seems like Sex Ed 101 to me that sponges are a barrier method of contraception. (It reminds me of those ads that say the pill doesn’t protect against STDs. Like, duh! Why would they?)

    The correction was fine:

    An article in Friday’s Section A on proposed ballot initiatives to give legal rights to fertilized eggs incorrectly stated that the contraceptive sponge prevents fertilized eggs from implanting in the uterus. The sponge prevents spermatozoa from fertilizing an egg and would not be at risk of being banned should the initiatives become law.

    But why not just eliminate the error from the story? To continue to publish an incorrect story with a correction inserted seems absurd to me. It’s also confusing to the reader.

    I’ve noticed this a lot lately in online newspapers. At the paper where I work, stories that have errors are corrected in the online version. Doing so shouldn’t be beyond the expertise of the L.A. Times. Why perpetuate a mistake?

  • Jerry

    Mark, you made the unsupported statement that all science and religion agrees when human life begins. That is not correct. http://8e.devbio.com/article.php?id=162 has a long discussion about that point including the history of belief in the answer and various scientific perspectives. The answer is not obvious to all but controversial. For example:

    In contrast to the genetic view, the embryological view states that human life originates not at fertilization but rather at gastrulation. Human embryos are capable of splitting into identical twins as late as 12 days after fertilization resulting in the development of separate individuals with unique personalities and different souls, according to the religious view. Therefore, properties governing individuality are not set until after gastrulation. This view is endorsed by a host of contemporary scientists such as Renfree (1982), Grobstein (1988) and McLaren.

    .

  • Donna

    So, scientifically, the fight is between people who say “An individual human life begins at conception ” and people who say “An individual human life begins 12 days later ” ?
    Heck, either one of these positions makes pretty much all surgical abortions, and a good many chemical ones as well, the taking of an individual human life. If abortion were made illegal after the 12th day of pregnancy, I’d be thrilled. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be a lot better than what we have now….

  • Dave2

    It looks like Riccardi just made the common (and I admit irritating) mistake of confusing the biological question of when an individual human life begins (which is relatively noncontroversial, if a bit stipulative) with the moral question of what living things have serious moral standing (which is what’s seriously controversial).

    So to spend a lot of time adducing scientific evidence and scientific consensus concerning the beginning of human life, the way Stricherz does, looks like much ado about nothing.

  • Jerry

    Just as a note for Donna, that web site I cited also has a neurological argument – that time when the brain starts showing recognizable activity as the start of human life. That occurs at week 8, 20 or 25 depending on your criteria.

  • http://www.tmatt.net tmatt

    But if the start of human life is a unique DNA code, then conception is it. Does anyone dispute the DNA code concept?

  • http://www.BillyOckham.blogspot.com Matthew

    Darn you! That headline was horribly misleading. I got all excited that Tootie or even Blair had disappeared and wound up reading some screed about abortion. When will your blog ever discuss important matters like early 80′s sitcoms?

  • http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld Tom Heneghan

    Like many reporters, Riccardi has confused biology with philosophy.

    Doesn’t this reading of Riccardi’s article confuse the biological and philosophical aspects of the abortion issue with the legal ones? Riccardi is clearly writing about the legal issues in his article and a fetus is not a person with legal rights under current law. The strategy of the law’s critics recognizes this by aiming for a legal solution, i.e. a constitutional amendment to grant personhood to the unborn. Riccardi did not confuse biology with philosophy because he did not deal with the abortion issue on that level, only on the legal level where the subjects of his story are operating. Adding the biological and philosophical aspects would have made a more complete story, but it would probably also have gone way beyond his length limit. The readers of the Los Angeles Times are surely intelligent enough to recognize the he is focusing here on new legal challenges to abortion, not discussing all relevant issues in the wider debate about it.

    Riccardi’s characterization of Roe v. Wade is not misleading. The Roe v. Wade opinion makes a clear distinction between the legal level and the biological and philosophical level of the abortion issue. On the legal level, it justifies its decision by stating that “the word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn.” In another paragraph, it says “the unborn have never been recognized in the law as persons in the whole sense.” The passage quoted above (“We need not resolve …”) refers to the biological and philosophical level of the debate, which the Supreme Court said it could not settle. If the opinion weren’t so clear on this point, its critics would not zero in on the personhood issue as a way to crack Roe v. Wade.

  • Dave2

    Tom, point taken on the legal focus of the article, but what explains Riccardi’s “amendments that would define life as beginning at conception” and “giving them the same legal protections as human beings”? Why not say “amendments that would define legal personhood as beginning at conception” or “giving them the same legal protection as normal adults”? It still looks like he’s confusing matters.

  • Martha

    Oh, great. They can’t even get their terms straight.

    The whole debate is over “personhood”. Not life – cells are alive, no-one is denying it, no-one is denying that the zygote is alive.

    Not even humanity – human sperm + human ovum = human zygote. The embryo and the foetus is human – not a banana, not a rock, not a frog.

    Now, we’re getting into the meat of the dispute. Is this a person or not? Proponents of abortion rights (and the guys going for embryonic stem cell research) argue that it is not, and therefore does not have the rights of a human person, nor any rights equivalent to the rights of the mother.

    Which leads into the ethical question of what is personhood? How do we achieve it? If we do not have personhood by virtue of our humanity, but rather it is a status granted to us under certain conditions and/or by others, then what is to prevent our personhood and those rights associated with it from being revoked? At any stage, not just in the womb: if the neonate is not to be considered self-aware and sentient, does it possess personhood? If not, it may be disposed of in the best medical method. If an Alzheimers’ patient has lost sentience, do they still possess personhood? If not, then they may be euthanized.

    If a certain group may be declared non-persons, then we may enslave, torture, murder or use them for whatever purposes we desire; since the mere fact of being human does not guarantee the status of personhood and the (no longer inalienable) rights of a person, then those who are legally-defined and validated persons will have rights superior to the non-persons.

    But of course, it’s easier to say “anti-choice zealots want to force women to have unwanted babies and endure dangerous pregnancies that might kill them”.

  • Lisa

    Sigh. This blog, I thought, was supposed to be about the representation of religion in the media. Instead, here’s another sign this is a biased, conservative Christian anti-choice blog. Why you are even bothering to comment on this article, which (as far as I can see) has nothing to do with this blog’s theme, is beyond me.

    The attitudes here are deeply depressing. I don’t understand this obsession, this idolization of very early term fetuses, placing them in importance above the life of the mother, above any other social factor that could affect both the mother and the child. Please get a grip on the big picture, folks. And if you’re angry about the loss of innocent human life, think about or do something to help the (incontestably sentient, independently-existing) victims in Darfur (for example).

  • http://www.getreligion.org Mollie

    Lisa,

    Human life issues are clearly within the scope of this blog, as has been discussed previously.

    Mark’s article is clearly about media coverage. This isn’t my post but it seems to me that your comments are neither constructive nor within the scope of what this blog covers.

    Remember, we’re not here to debate the issues (on which you and many others have a very strong opinion). We’re here to discuss media coverage of same.

  • Lisa

    Martha,

    Hmmm. That’s interesting. So if I agreed with you, I would be on topic. But since I don’t agree with you, I’m not on topic. Am I allowed to say I see no problem with this news article at all? There’s no bias.

    I don’t see how the various anti-choice rants here have anything to do with the theme. And calling this article a “human life” issue is an anti-choice assumption about a fetus. Its just not relevant.

  • http://www.getreligion.org Mollie

    Lisa,

    Assuming you were responding to my comment, my name is MOLLIE, not Martha. Why did you say, “if I agreed with you, I would be on topic”?

    If you want to address the article or the post, feel free. I was just pointing out that your comment — in which you alleged that the post was not relevant to the mission of this blog — was incorrect.

    And the whole article was about the “human life issue” so, um, well, that’s all I have to say about that.

    And I will now leave this post to Mark and his readers . . .

    Mollie

  • Deacon John M. Bresnahan

    If –as so many articles in the MSM media do–and some here want to do— we separate the concept of something called “personhood” from the start of individualized human life as shown by science through DNA–then we are on a slippery slope that can easily
    go all the way to a Holocaust of any group of humans we suddenly decide to get rid of. Jews were first denied “personhoood” in German scientific and Nazi propaganda. After that came the movement to exterminate Jewish life.
    There is already a tenured professor at Yale University who advocates not granting “personhood” to the newly born until parents decide the child is “perfect” enough to deserve life. This is virtually synonomous to how the German people were psychologically prepped for accepting getting rid of “life unworthy of life” as they called it. But how much coverage of these aspects of the issue get into the MSM???

  • Christine Robinson

    The issue about abortion doesn’t hinge on when a fetus becomes human, and declaring it human doesn’t end the abortion debate. The fact that a fetus is human doesn’t mean a woman has to house it in her personal body, any more than the fact that a homeless person is human requires you to house them in your personal house…something that would be far less an affront to your own personhood than being required to share your body with a developing human being. The fact that 2/3 of women who are pregnant joyfully or at least willingly make this incredible sacrifice to support the life of a fetus doesn’t make it right to require all women who accidentally get pregnant to give up all their human rights to support a baby they don’t want. Mandatory uterus donations is no more reasonable than mandatory kidney donations…which would save a lot of lives that everyone agrees are human.

  • http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld Tom Heneghan

    Dave2,

    These suggestions risk adding confusion to sentences that don’t have it now. Riccardi presumably didn’t write “legal personhood” in the lead paragraph because it’s not a common term and might not be readily understood. “Define life as beginning at conception” is correct and also understandable to a normal reader. He then introduces the term personhood right away, in the second paragraph, to more closely define what he is writing about. The quotation marks indicate it’s a term he thinks will be new to his readers. This is a standard journalistic technique that helps rather than hinders comprehension.

    If he had written about giving fetuses the same legal protection “as normal adults” instead of “as human beings,” that could be interpreted as saying minors don’t have or deserve full legal protection. Minors aren’t adults, but they are human beings. Restricting legal protection to “normal adults” could mean the unborn are not the only ones lacking legal status and a right to life — this could apply to anyone under 18 and anyone considered “not normal.” A chilling thought in an article about life and death issues…

  • http://filmchatblog.blogspot.com/ Peter T Chattaway

    tmatt wrote:
    But if the start of human life is a unique DNA code, then conception is it. Does anyone dispute the DNA code concept?

    I don’t know if I’d call it a “dispute” per se, but just as single embryos sometimes divide into two embryos, it is also true that two embryos sometimes merge into a single embryo — hence you occasionally come across someone who is a “chimera”, i.e. someone who has two different sets of DNA in his or her body. If “a unique DNA code” represents “the start of human life”, then how do we regard people who have two unique DNA codes? Obviously the person in question is a single human life, but the person in question was formed by the merging of two unique human lives in the womb. So did one of those unique human lives come to an end? Did both of those unique human lives come to an end so that a third life could arise from the merger?

  • http://www.infrontofyournose.com Mark

    I will try to respond to three readers:

    1) Jerry, please re-read my post. I think your comments mischaracterized its contents.

    a) I never wrote or even implied that “all science and religion agree on when human life begins.” I wrote that “Christian denominations” agree when life begins. Which ones disagree, may I ask?

    b) As for your point about scientists disagreeing about when human life beings, I anticipated your argument about twins forming from an embryo.

    You wrote

    Human embryos are capable of splitting into identical twins as late as 12 days after fertilization resulting in the development of separate individuals with unique personalities and different souls, according to the religious view.

    I wrote:

    In the overwhelming number of cases, an individual human life begins at fertilization or conception. (The exception is identical twinning, when an embryo splits and a second human life begins. In that case, the first human life begins at fertilization, and the second when the embryo splits or divides.)

    2) Dave 2 and Tom Heneghan, reporters who follow your implicit advice to focus only on the legal and moral questions about any issue, including abortion, are misinforming their readers. Surely we agree on this point.

    Take the Bush administration’s claims that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD. Would you have actually advised reporters to focus only on the legal and moral questions involved: does Hussein possess the right to have WMD and should he? I think we can agree that reporters should also have focused on another issue: whether Hussein, in fact, did possess WMD.

    Reporters need to tell their readers about all sides of an issue. Otherwise, they come across as having a political agenda.

    3) Tom Heneghan, you recommend conflating the legal and biological aspects of the abortion debate. Isn’t this reductionistic, anti-intellectual, and patronizing?

    I also find the advice to be confusing. You were once a fertilized egg. I wonder what you would have advised Riccardi to have called you. A human non-person? A human embryo? A humanoid?

  • Dave2

    Mark wrote:

    Dave 2 and Tom Heneghan, reporters who follow your implicit advice to focus only on the legal and moral questions about any issue, including abortion, are misinforming their readers. Surely we agree on this point.

    But there is no scientific issue here. No one has ever denied that human zygotes are members of Homo sapiens. No one has ever denied that they are alive. There is zero controversy on this point.

    What there is controversy on is whether human zygotes (blastocysts, etc.) have serious moral standing, and whether they deserve legal protection. So for a journalist to focus on the scientific issue would be misleading. It would suggest to readers that the scientific questions are the controversial questions, as if they were somehow equivalent to the moral/legal questions.

    This is important because, even though some pro-lifers seem to think that settling the scientific questions somehow settles the moral/legal questions (I guess because they presuppose that any living member of Homo sapiens has serious moral standing and deserves legal protection), the bulk of pro-choicers reject that idea. In other words, it distorts the debate to treat the scientific questions as central. After all, the debate is not over the scientific questions, but the moral/legal implications thereof.

  • Dave2

    Mark wrote:

    I also find the advice to be confusing. You were once a fertilized egg. I wonder what you would have advised Riccardi to have called you. A human non-person? A human embryo? A humanoid?

    And what in the world is this about? Is this blog incapable of discussing abortion without presupposing the correctness of the pro-life position?

  • http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld Tom Heneghan

    Mark, hold the Saddam analogies. I don’t see where you find me advising reporters to focus only on the legal and moral questions “on any issue” or on abortion. You either do not see the distinction between law and morality, which Riccardi’s article assumes, or you do not accept it and therefore misread the article and my comments about it. In either case, if you really think that I am advising reporters to ignore facts, then we simply have nothing more to say.

    Your statement that I also recommend “conflating the legal and biological aspects of the abortion debate” is equally baseless. I recommended nothing — you jumped to conclusions. All I did was refer to the indisputable fact that current law does not give fetuses legal status as a person. Is recognising a fact “reductionist, anti-intellectual and patronizing”? It is exactly because of this fact that the activists Riccardi writes about are trying to get a constitutional amendment to give fetuses personhood. It might be an uncomfortable fact, but trying to dismiss it as anything else doesn’t change it in the least.

    What would I have told Riccardi to call me back when I was a fertilized egg? I couldn’t have told him anything; fertilized eggs can neither speak nor reason.

  • Dave2

    Tom,

    You write that “‘Define life as beginning at conception’ is correct and also understandable to a normal reader.” But it is plainly incorrect. It falsely states that these amendments are in the business of defining what counts as living. That is an outrageous distortion of the issue. I can’t imagine why you say that it’s correct.

    You also write that “If he had written about giving fetuses the same legal protection ‘as normal adults’ instead of ‘as human beings,’ that could be interpreted as saying minors don’t have or deserve full legal protection.” I appreciate the possibility that someone could misinterpret the statement. People are prone to misinterpret things. Maybe that’s a good reason not to use ‘as normal adults’, to look for a better phrase.

    But first, the use of ‘as human beings’ is still hopelessly flawed. The controversy is not over whether human fetuses count as human beings—they are clearly members of Homo sapiens. Pro-choicers can and do cheerfully admit that human fetuses are human beings. In any case, to say that these amendments are in the business of marking out species boundaries is patently absurd.

    And second, I would insist that, from the true claim that these amendments would give fetuses the same legal protection as normal adults, it in no way follows that this protection doesn’t or shouldn’t extend to others besides normal adults. It says nothing and it implies nothing about minors or the abnormal. All it says is what it says: that these amendments would give fetuses the same legal protection as normal adults.

    So it still looks like an improvement over ‘as human beings’, which (as I’ve pointed out) is hopeless.

  • Mark Stricherz

    Dave 2,

    I understand your point that many pro-choicers and pro-lifers disagree over the moral, as opposed to biological, aspects of the debate.

    However, I find your following claim to be flat-out wrong: “There is no scientific issue here. No one has ever denied that human zygotes are members of Homo Sapiens.” The passage I cited from Roe refutes that assertion. In fact, every major Supreme Court decision on abortion referred fetuses and embryos as “potential human beings,” not human beings. And as the debate over Riccardi’s story shows, there is a live controversy over biology, morality, and the law.

  • Mark Stricherz

    Tom,

    In your first post, you defended Riccardi for not writing about the biological aspect of the abortion debate on two grounds:

    Riccardi did not confuse biology with philosophy because he did not deal with the abortion issue on that level, only on the legal level where the subjects of his story are operating. Adding the biological and philosophical aspects would have made a more complete story, but it would probably also have gone way beyond his length limit.

    In your second post, you defended Riccardi again, this time on the grounds that conflating the biological and legal aspects is more understandable to readers and technically corrrect:

    Riccardi presumably didn’t write “legal personhood” in the lead paragraph because it’s not a common term and might not be readily understood. “Define life as beginning at conception” is correct and also understandable to a normal reader. He then introduces the term personhood right away, in the second paragraph, to more closely define what he is writing about. The quotation marks indicate it’s a term he thinks will be new to his readers. This is a standard journalistic technique that helps rather than hinders comprehension.

    In your third post, you responded to my point that the biological aspect of Riccardi’s article was inaccurate by saying: “Hold the Saddam analogies.”

    Yes, you distinguished between the legal and moral aspects of the debate. But our readers should be forgiven for concluding that you have dodged the biological aspect of the debate. Do you omit the biological issue for your readers, too?

  • Dave2

    Mark, I think the most charitable interpretation of the court’s language (“potential human beings”) is not that fetuses are potential members of Homo sapiens, but that fetuses are potential rights-holders or potential persons or something like that.

    After all, the facts concerning species membership are not at all obscure and the members of the court aren’t completely clueless. More plausible to say they used ambiguous and misleading language than to say they don’t know that human fetuses are human whereas e.g. dog fetuses are dog.

  • http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld Tom Heneghan

    Mark, every newspaper article has to include some issues and omit others or it would turn into a book. The question is whether the reporter includes in a fair way all the information relevant to the topic being addressed. This article addressed the legal issues in the abortion debate and gave the views of both those for and against the current abortion law. This article is not about when human life begins, but about actions by groups with different views of when the law should say that early human life acquires full legal rights, i.e. before or after birth.

    Bulking up this article with scientists’ views of when human life begins would not change its main purpose — reporting on how groups that want the law to give fetuses the same full legal rights as a live person are using new legal strategies to try to make it do so. Leaving out the biological issues is not “dodging the biological aspect of the debate.” It is reporting directly on a new legal strategy to crack Roe v. Wade. This is the issue to focus on, as the right-to-life groups cited in the article do.

  • Dave2

    Tom wrote:

    This article is not about when human life begins, but about actions by groups with different views of when the law should say that early human life acquires full legal rights, i.e. before or after birth.

    That’s exactly right. And that’s exactly why Riccardi screwed up in writing about “defin[ing] life” and about “human status” and about “the same legal protections as human beings”.