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Noonan claimed that his argument is 'an appeal to probabilities
that actually exist, not to any and all states of affairs which
may be imagined'. But once we substitute the real probabilities
161
Practical Ethics
of embryos, at various stages of their existence, becoming persons,
Noonan's argument no longer supports the moment of
fertilisation as the time at which the embryo gains a significantly
different moral status. Indeed, if we were to require an 80%
probability of further development into a baby - the figure
Noonan himself mentions - we would have to wait until nearly
six weeks after fertilisation before the embryo would have the
significance Noonan wants to claim for it.
At one point in his argument Noonan refers to the number
of sperm involved in a male ejaculation, and says that there is
only one chance in 200,000,000 of a sperm becoming part of
a living being. This focus on the sperm rather than the egg is a
curious instance of male bias, but even if we let that pass, new
technology provides still one more difficulty for the argument.
There now exists a means of overcoming male infertility caused
by a low sperm count. The egg is removed as in the normal in
vitro procedure; but instead of adding a drop of seminal fluid
to the dish with the egg, a single sperm is picked up with a fine
needle and micro-injected under the outer layer of the egg. So
if we compare the probability of the embryo becoming a person
with the probability of the egg, together with the single sperm
that has been picked up by the needle and is about to be microinjected
into the egg, becoming a person, we will be unable to
find any sharp distinction between the two. Does that mean
that it would be wrong to stop the procedure, once the sperm
has been picked up? Noonan's argument from probabilities
would seem to commit him either to this implausible claim, or
to accepting that we may destroy human embryos. This procedure
also undermines Ramsey's claim about the importance
of the unique genetic blueprint - that' "never-to-be-repeated"
informational speck' having been determined in the case of the
embryo but not in the case of the egg and sperm. For that too
is here determined before fertilisation.
In this section I have tried to show how the special circum-
162
Taking Life: The Embryo and the Fetus
stances of the embryo in the laboratory affect the application
of the arguments discussed elsewhere in this chapter about the
status of the embryo or fetus. I have not attempted to cover all
aspects of in vitro fertilisation and embryo experimentation. To
do that it would be necessary to investigate several other issues,
including the appropriateness of allocating scarce medical resources
to this area at a time when the world has a serious
problem of overpopulation, and the speculation that the new
techniques will be misused to produce children 'made-to order',
either at the behest of parents or, worse still, of some mad
dictator. To cover these important but disparate matters would
take us too far from the main themes of this book. Brief mention
must, however, be made of one other aspect of embryo experimentation:
the role of the couple from whose gametes the
embryo has developed.
Feminists have played a valuable role in pointing out how
vulnerable a couple may be to pressure from the medical team
to donate an embryo for research purposes. They may be desperate
for a child. The IVF team represent their last hope of
achieving this goal. They know that there are many other couples
seeking treatment. All this means that they are likely to be
prepared to go to great lengths in order to please the medical
team. When they are asked to donate eggs or embryos, can they
really make a free choice? Only, I think, if it is quite clear that
their answer will not affect their IVF treatment in any way.
Wherever experimentation on embryos is carried out, there is
a need to develop safeguards and forms of oversight to ensure
that this is always the case.
MAKING USE OF THE FETUS
The prospects of using human fetuses for medical purposes has
created a further controversial issue related to abortion. Research
carried out specifically on fetuses has led to the hope of
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Practical Ethics
finding cures for many serious illnesses by the transplantation
of tissue or cells from the fetus. Compared with adult tissue,
fetal tissue appears to grow better after transplantation, and to
be less likely to be rejected by the patient. The example that
has received the most publicity to date is Parkinson's disease,
but the use of fetal tissue has also been suggested in the treatment
of Alzheimer's Disease, Huntington's Disease, and diabetes;
and fetal transplants have been used to save the life of
another fetus, in a case in which a 30 week old fetus, in utero,
suffering from a fatal immune system disorder was given fetal
cells from aborted fetuses.
Do fetuses have rights or interests that may be violated or
harmed by using them for these purposes? I have already argued
that the fetus has no right to, nor strictly speaking even an
interest in, life. But we have seen that, in the case of animals,
to say that a being has no right to life does not mean that the
being has no rights or interests at all. If the fetus is capable of
feeling pain, then, like animals, the fetus has an interest in not
suffering pain, and that interest should be given equal consideration
with the similar interests of any other being. It is easy
to imagine that keeping a fetus alive after an abortion in order
to preserve the tissue of the fetus in the best possible condition
could cause pain and suffering to a fetus capable of feeling pain.
So we must now return to a more detailed investigation of a
topic touched upon earlier in this chapter: When does the fetus