Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [62]
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of IVF is that the extraordinary circumstances surrounding these births no longer make us view the babies any differently to those born ‘naturally’. Scientists trample our taboos into the dust and lead us beyond the borders of the forbidden. And we are glad. Harvard Medical School’s John D. Biggers has summed up this sentiment with a frank admission. Given what subsequently unfolded, he is pleased that Edwards and Steptoe ignored the official concerns. ‘In retrospect, it is fortunate that Edwards and Steptoe pressed on,’ he said in an editorial accompanying that Human Reproduction paper. ‘Although the grant was rejected, Edwards and Steptoe’s visions and persistence have benefited an enormous number of infertile people, both male and female.’
It is a rarely acknowledged truth that, among all society’s leading figures – political, intellectual, social and religious – scientists are the ones who really can take us into the promised land. Although religious groups are often seen as sources of moral and ethical guidance, they actually follow science – they do not lead it. And nowhere is this more obvious than in the sacred territory of life and death.
It was, for instance, the philosopher Aristotle – not the author of some sacred text – who most of the world’s major religions looked to in their initial forays into reproductive ethics. In his view, conception took a few days, during which the semen ‘set’ the menstrual blood, just as rennet sets milk to make cheese. The foetus then went through a succession of souls: first ‘nutritive’, then ‘sensitive’, then ‘rational’. Truly human life, according to Aristotle, was present in the womb only once distinct organs had formed and the foetus became capable of movement. This ‘quickening’ occurred at forty days for males, and ninety days for females.
Aristotle had little empirical evidence on which to base these arguments. He based his dates on when women said they felt foetal movements, and on examinations of miscarried or aborted foetuses. But it was the best information available to him, and religious groups made full use of it in framing their own dictates on the ethics of embryology.
The Babylonian Talmud, compiled around AD 500, says that it takes forty days for an embryo to form in the mother’s womb. Until then it is ‘merely water’; after then, it is ‘like the thigh of its mother’ – and thus imbued with only a limited humanity. Aristotle helped to set the first Christian time limit on abortion. Pope Gregory XIII’s mandate was informed by St Augustine’s discussion of the issue; the central questions in abortion for Augustine were ‘Does the foetus have a soul?’ and ‘Is the foetus formed or unformed?’
If the embryo is still unformed, but yet in some way ensouled while unformed … the law does not provide that the act pertains to homicide, because still there cannot be said to be a live soul in a body that lacks sensation, if it is in flesh not yet formed and thus not yet endowed with senses.
When that ensoulment happened was simply a matter of opinion. In 1584 the Pope decided to set it at forty days – at, in other words, Aristotle’s ‘quickening’. Science had, subtly, taken control of the religious viewpoint.
That limit remained in place for 300 years, but science’s influence only got stronger. It was a subsequent scientific development, the invention of the microscope, that led to the next