Datasets:
DebateLabKIT
/
deepa2-corpus

Dataset card Data Studio Files
xet
 Community
text
stringlengths
0
1.71k
become conscious?
Fortunately it is now possible to give a reasonably definite
answer to this question. The part of the brain associated with
sensations of pain, and more generally with consciousness, is
the cerebral cortex. Until 18 weeks of gestation, the cerebral
cortex is not sufficiently developed for synaptic connections to
take place within it - in other words, the signals that give rise
to pain in an adult are not being received. Between 18 and 25
weeks, the brain of the fetus reaches a stage at which there is
some nerve transmission in those parts associated with con-
164
Taking Life: The Embryo and the Fetus
sciousness. Even then, however, the fetus appears to be in a
persistent state of sleep, and therefore may not be able to perceive
pain. The fetus begins to 'wake up' at a gestational age of
around 30 weeks. This is, of course, well beyond the stage of
viability, and a 'fetus' that was alive and outside the womb at
this stage would be a premature baby, and not a fetus at all.
In order to give the fetus the benefit of the doubt, it would
be reasonable to take the earliest possible time at which the
fetus might be able to feel anything as the boundary after which
the fetus should be protected. Thus we should disregard the
uncertain evidence about wakefulness, and take as a more definite
line, the time at which the brain is physically capable of
receiving signals necessary for awareness. This suggests a
boundary at 18 weeks of gestation. Prior to that time, there is
no good basis for believing that the fetus needs protection from
harmful research, because the fetus cannot be harmed. After
that time, the fetus does need protection from harm, on the
same basis as sentient, but not self-conscious, nonhuman animals
need it.
There is, however, one qualification that must be added to
this statement. While the fetus prior to 18 weeks may, strictly
speaking, be unable to be harmed, if the fetus is allowed to
develop into a child, the future child could be very seriously
harmed by an experiment that caused the child to be born in
a disabled state. Therefore research that allows the fetus to survive
beyond 18 weeks does not come under the permissive rule
suggested in the previous paragraph.
In discussions of the use of fetal tissue there is often mention
of the risk of 'complicity' in the immoral act of abortion. Those
wishing to defend the use of fetal tissue therefore go to great
lengths in order to show that the use of fetal tissue can be kept
entirely separate from the decision to carry out the abortion,
and so does not serve to 'legitimise' abortions. For the same
reason, many countries now have, or are developing, laws or
guidelines for the use of fetal tissue from induced abortions,
165
Practical Ethics
and many of these laws or guidelines are drawn up on the basis
of the assumption, implicit or explicit, that it is important to
separate the decision for the abortion from the use of the fetal
tissue, lest the use of fetal tissue serve to increase the incidence
of abortions. There may be, for example, a requirement that the
donation has to be an entirely anonymous one. This prevents
a woman having an abortion in order to donate tissue that might
save the life of a relative, perhaps one of her existing children.
It is possible that the motivation for such requirements is to
protect the woman from pressure to have an abortion. Whether
that is a valid ground for requiring anonymity is something I
shall consider shortly. Here I wish only to point out that if it is
the premise that abortion is immoral that supplies the motive
for seeking to prevent any 'complicity' between the use of the
fetal tissue and the carrying out of the abortion, or to ensure
that fetal tissue use does not contribute to a higher incidence
of abortions, then the arguments presented in this chapter count
against that view. At least when carried out before 18 weeks,
abortion is in itself morally neutral. Even later abortions, when
some pain may be involved, could be justified if the outcome
were to prevent much greater suffering by saving the life of a
child suffering from an immune system disorder, or to cure
Parkinson's or Alzheimer's disease in an older person. If the
requirement that we separate the act of abortion from the donation
of fetal tissue cannot be soundly based on the need to
protect the fetus, can it be founded instead on a need to protect
the parents, in particular the woman? Different aspects of this
separation need to be considered. If the doctor counselling the
pregnant woman about her abortion and the doctor seeking
fetal tissue for a dying patient are one and the same, the conflict
of interest is clear, and there seems a real risk that the doctor
will not be able to give disinterested advice to the pregnant
woman. So this separation is an important aspect of protecting
the position of the pregnant woman.
What, though, of the view that the pregnant woman must
166
Taking Life: The Embryo and the Fetus
be separated from the recipient by a veil of anonymity? This,
of course, prevents her having an abortion in order to provide
tissue to someone she knows. Is this restriction justified by consideration
of her own interests? On the one hand, without this
protection it is easy to imagine scenarios in which a pregnant
woman would find herself under great pressure to abort a pregnancy
in order to save the life of a dying relative; or a woman
who is not pregnant might feel that she has to become pregnant
and then terminate the pregnancy to provide the needed fetal
tissue. Feminists may well feel that in a society in which men
are dominant, the prospects for further intensifying the oppression
of women in this way is reason enough to exclude the
designation of tissue for a particular known person.
Yet the argument for the opposite conclusion is also strong.