We’re studying human sexuality in our Zoology class right now, and part of the handout that he gave us in our first class goes:
“How are human studies possible in this area [fetal sexual development]? We cannot experiment directly on human fetuses to determine whether altering levels of hormones such as testosterone at critical times in prenatal development might affect behaviour in childhood and thereafter.”
Okay. Let’s, for the purpose of debate, exclude right now any experimentation that might harm the mother in the process.
My general thinking on the logic of this is: we can’t experiment on human fetuses because it violates basic human rights as expressed in the Nuremberg Code (no medical experiment can be performed on any human being without their full knowledge and unforced consent). Copacetic? Cool.
But what about the logic behind abortions, then? I mean, if you accept that terminating an undesired fetus is all right, why not accept that experimenting on a fetus is all right (particularly if it’s a non-lethal and non-harmful experiment?)
It may be a flawed premise, and I’m looking forward to someone pointing the flaws out, but it seems kind of illogical to me. What do you guys think?
I arbitrarily place the line between human cells and human being at, say, 18 weeks (which is just as arbitrary as sperm-egg fusion, by the way). Therefore, I bite the bullet and say that one may experiment on a 17.99 week old foetus just as one may on any other human cells bound for a surgical waste bag. But the moment the clock ticks to 18 weeks, that full human being (or another on his or her behalf) can now sue you for any act or negligence on your part which it considers inequitable, such as mucking about with its testosterone levels a few minutes ago despite your assurances that it was safe.
In short, go ahead and experiment, but make damned sure you destroy it before deadline.
We don’t experiment on foetus because if something goes wrong, or there are unexpected side effects, that foetus will become a person who’s going to live with that their whole life. We don’t know how it might effect them; and, while they are not yet human beings, or sentient to that level ( the grounds for abortion ) they are going to be.
Let me see if I can make an analogy. Say you’ve invented a computer program that, over time, will gain sentience to a par with humans. You can turn off the program before it gains sentience, because it’s still just a machine. Once it’s gained sentience, though, you can’t, because it’s “alive”. Now, say that before it gains sentience, you mess around with the programming of it a little - just to see what it might do. You can still turn off the program at any time, but once it’s gained sentience, it has all the rights of a sentient being, but it has now altered programming. And we’re not sure what that programming may have done to it; but we can’t turn it off or alter it back again now. The program is stuck the way it is until the end of it’s lifespan.
Moreover, abortion law doesn’t require a fetus to be considered absolutely negligible as far as rights are concerned.
The reasoning behind abortion rights is the notion that before a fetus reaches a certain stage of development (arbitrarily pegged at some number of weeks since conception for legal purposes), a woman’s right to control her own body outweighs any rights the fetus may have, even the right not to be killed.
Later in pregnancy, when the fetus is more developed and closer to being considered a full person, the priorities are reversed.
Just because we are willing to sacrifice early-stage fetuses in order to protect a woman’s right to control her own body doesn’t logically oblige us to permit experimentation on fetuses for purposes of scientific research.
It doesn’t logically forbid such experimentation either, of course. But there is nothing fundamentally inconsistent or self-contradictory about saying that a woman is allowed to kill her fetus to terminate a pregnancy, but scientists aren’t allowed to perform medical experiments on fetuses. There is (as currently interpreted) a fundamental right to terminate one’s own pregnancy; there is no fundamental right to perform scientific experiments.
This has been explained to me before but I have not retained the gist of it. Something to do with ‘nature does not make leaps?’ Can you explain, or link to an explanatiion?
Which is absurd, since if the fetus is a distinct human individual (as expert medical testimony attests), then it is NOT simply part of the mother’s body. Additionally, since life is the most fundamental of all human rights – the one upon which all other rights are contingent – then other rights (including bodily control) must not trump the right to one’s very own existence.
How do you show that it’s non-lethal and non-harmful without trying it? It seems that the experiment is necessary to show the experiment is non-harmful.
There are, of course, certain experiments that involve fetuses. Experimental surgeries, for example, like they do with fetuses with spina bifida or certain other physical abnormalities. The experiments in those cases are determined to be reasonable because the outcomes are reasonable. The fetus might be killed but it would have died anyway, perhaps.
I do not know how they determine if a drug is safe for pregnant women other than by experimenting to see if it crosses the placental barrier. Anyone?
My opinion is that life begins when the zygote implants in the uterine wall. At that point the zygote will begin developing into a fetus. Before implantation, there is no guarantee that a person will grow. After implantation, if there are no problems, a person will grow. In other words, no interference is required from that point.
So no, I don’t think it’s ok to experiment on or abort fetuses at any stage of development.
AFAIK, no legal defense of abortion rights rests at all on the claim that the fetus is “simply part of the mother’s body”. Everybody knows that a fetus has a different combination of genes, and if it undergoes a normal gestation, will develop into an entirely different and separate individual. That’s basic biology.
But since the fetus in the early stages of gestation is so undeveloped, and so dependent in every way on the support of the pregnant woman’s body, most of the world’s legal systems concur that the fetus is not a legally recognized full person whose right to life overrides the pregnant woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy.
The question of how the law arbitrarily assigns different rights and different levels of “human individuality” at different developmental stages of life is a social and legal question, not a biological one. Therefore, there’s no simple, objective, scientific way to determine what rights a fetus has.