When does life start?

Seems a simple enough question. A simple question perhaps, but spawning a very complex answer not only littered with cultural, religious, political, legal and sociologically mines but the underlying question of just defining what constitutes life is daunting. This, in turn, leads to a host of subquestions including: Does life start at conception; Does life start when it becomes viable on its own; Does life start when the organism can reproduce itself? to name just a few of the problems I encountered.

It seems that definition of “life” is somewhat nebulous. Before sinking deeper into the life definition abyss and in order to proceed we already have to limit our inquiry. Note that the abortion/contraception debate seems to be centered around human life and since that is what concerns me let’s restrict our discussion to “when does an individual human life begin?”. Even restricting ourselves to this single topic there are numerous subtle issues.

After reading the literature I have to admit that I am really uncomfortable with virtually all of the definitions about when human life begins. It also appears to me that distinguishing between a “human being” and a “human person“, as some do, fails in resolving this question too and just succeeds in confusing the fundamental issue of when human life begins. For example, to state that a human being is a human organism that has developed consciousness so should be protected while if the organism hasn’t developed consciousness it is not a “person” so has no rights seems a silly argument to me. What about a person in a coma? Do they lose all rights? On the note, what if the person in the coma were brain dead? Do we continue to maintain life support no matter what? I don’t have an answer to these questions but my sense is that is if the person is brain dead we “pull the plug” otherwise the comatose person retains all the rights of any other human being. This is an unsatisfactory implicit definition but the best I can devise at the moment.

Since I have to have a definition in order to proceed I thought that I’d simply choose to assume that human life starts at conception. I naively thought that this was a straightforward definition and would at least provide a common starting point for considering the larger issues but I was wrong.

While it is clear to me that human life can’t start until the egg is fertilized by the note what happens after that is not at all clear. I had thought this would resolve the contraception issue but then I learned that some contraception techniques work by preventing a fertilized egg from being implanted. Hence the egg is aborted.

Well, what are we to do? That is, if an egg is fertilized but not implanted then aborted where do we draw the line distinguishing when life starts? At one cell? Two cells? 20 cells? Hundreds of cells? Well I don’t have the answer but it seems to me that if the fertilized egg has never been implanted then we have to concede that no viable human life was involved. To assume otherwise would mean that every woman who has ever temporarily carried an unimplanted fertilized egg is guilty of murder. A ridiculous assumption that would doom a significant fraction of the Earth’s population since no woman has any control over such natural processes.

Well, that’s that! The conclusion that seems most reasonable to me is that there are no morals or rights violated by note. But where to proceed after that conclusion is not at all clear. However, we have to assume something in order to continue so, for convenience, let’s temporarily assume that human life begins when a fertilized egg has been implanted and see what develops. What this assumption ignores is such things as IVF (In vitro fertilisation). At some point we have to distinguish between “life” and “potential life” but for now I’m using the above definition because I don’t want to start down another slippery slope.

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Tags: Abortion, contraception, politics, Science

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 5:03 pm and is filed under Abortion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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