Human Embryo Research: From Moral Uncertainty to Death

William P. Cheshire (2004) brings to our attention the striking disparity—roughly 4:1—between words and phrases in the public press that downgrade versus upgrade the moral status of human embryos. Based on these findings, Cheshire offers several insights:

• Diversity of opinion exists even among experts on society's moral obligation to nascent human life.
• Skewed linguistic distribution also indicates a distinct bias.
• Responsibility for holding the media to a higher standard of truth and fairness falls to us all.

While his data clearly show the diversity of opinion, it concerns me that Cheshire presents no evidence to indicate, as he seems to want to imply, that the bias is a consequence of journalistic prejudices rather than the prejudices of the experts themselves. This is an important distinction because if the language used in the 53 news articles that he surveyed reflects accurately the language used by what he calls the interested parties—bioethicists, scientists, physicians, policymakers, and patients—then sanitizing their expressions would itself reflect a poor standard of truth and fairness, indeed, poor journalism. What if in mentioning Cheshire's relatively complete list of interested parties, I had decided to add the category of clergy? His failure to mention clergy seems to be a significant omission given the prominence of religious-based thinking in the embryo debate. Nevertheless, even if I suppose that the omission was unintentional, it would have been inappropriate for me to revise Cheshire's language in discussing his point of view.

Besides words and phrases, the ethical framework used to present the embryo research controversy also has important implications regarding moral status. Cheshire's description of the controversy as a choice between ontological versus utilitarian valuation of human life is a case in point. I would argue that presenting the choice in this fashion markedly downgrades the potential moral value of the embryo because it minimizes the possibility expressed by many, including the current president of the United States (Bush 2001), that embryos are persons. Those who adopt such an essentialist perspective believe that a person's life begins as soon as the potential for a human being exists and that an embryo is simply a person who has not yet been born. Were embryos persons, then utilitarian considerations would be irrelevant. Research on person-embryos would be unethical no matter how useful or important, as clearly articulated in the Helsinki Guidelines: "A.5. In medical research on human subjects, considerations related to the well-being of the human subject should take precedence over the interests of science and society" (52nd World Medical Association General Assembly 2000).

Indeed, it is only by ignoring the essentialist perspective and adopting the competing existential viewpoint that the utilitarian issue becomes relevant at all. According to the existential viewpoint, personhood emerges as the embryo develops, and the human identity of the clump of cells that makes up the embryo does not by itself establish personhood. Therefore, while the human embryo might deserve some degree of special respect or protection because of its potential, destruction of not-yet-person-embryos would nonetheless be ethically acceptable if the utilitarian benefits outweighed the moral risks.

Interestingly, even if embryos were considered persons, this would not necessarily preclude embryo research. Here the language of moral uncertainty about human embryos contains an ironic element. Speaking of embryos in terms of death fits into Cheshire's analysis as an example of language that upgrades the moral status of the embryo. At the same time, however, defining embryo death can increase the potential for doing embryo research (Grinnell 2003). For instance, Doerflinger (1999), one of the leading spokespersons for the Catholic perspective on research on embryonic stem cells, wrote:

Catholic teaching requires that the corpses of human embryos and fetuses ... be respected just as the remains of other human beings. Use of such material [e.g., for research] is not rejected in principle, but must meet...