I have wanted to write about this for a while, now, ever since I read through the thread called (Very) Basic Economics and Abortion over at Alas, A Blog. Since then, though, a number of things have happened: the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case concerning so-called “partial-birth abortions,” South Dakota has passed the most restrictive law in the country against abortion, Utah has a proposed law that would eliminate incest exceptions in its parental notification law, and I have been in another conversation, What If Your Mother Was Pro-Choice, on Alas, the initial post of which concerned a common strategy used by people who are anti-choice to try to silence those of us who are pro-choice: what would have happened if your mother had chosen to have an abortion instead of giving birth to you?
At one point the thread became a conversation about whether the immaculate conception was an instance of divine rape or not (start reading here). This was relevant because it went to the question of what it means for women to have real choice in terms of pregnancy and childbirth — which also means in terms of when and whether and under what conditions to have sex — and, though I don’t remember that this point was brought out explicitly, to the question of what we model our understanding of women’s reproductive choice on. (I have italicized this because it will become important later on, towards the end of what I want to say.) What I want to do here is to try to tie all these various things together under the title I have given this post because I think it goes to the heart of understanding a rarely articulated aspect of what is at stake in the anti-choice position, whether it is articulated in explicitly religious terms or not, and because, under the general strategy of “know thine enemy,” I think this is an important understanding to reach. It’s going to take a while, and I’m going to have to make a number of leaps, to get where I want to go in this, so I hope you will bear with me.
The (Very) Basic Economics and Abortion thread concerns the question of how most effectively to reduce the number of abortions, by passing laws which permit the practice or those which restrict it. Inevitably, however, the discussion devolved into one about sexual morality, the question of whether and how to teach abstinence as part of sex education, the differences between religious and other approaches to sexual morality and so on. The simple fact that the discussion evolved in this way, motivated largely by two contributors RonF and gengwall, at least one of whom (gengwall) is unambiguously anti-abortion, demonstrates that there is a great deal more at stake for the anti-abortion position than simply whether or not abortion is legal. One can assume, I think, that even if abortion were rendered completely unnecessary starting tomorrow, the debate would then shift quite seamlessly and without losing any of its heat, to questions of sexual morality, because on this level the debate is not only about whether abortion ends pregnancies or murders unborn children, it is also, and in some ways primarily, about whether the sex that resulted in those pregnancies happened under “legitimate” and “morally approvable” circumstances.
The part of this thread that really caught my eye, however, was when people started talking about the definition of personhood. As part of that discussion, gengwall wrote the following (towards the end of the comment):
As far as the personhod argument in general, it has nothing to do with patriarchy either. It has everything to do with biology. I’m afraid you are stuck with this one as the objective biological facts don’t change depending on which country you go to.
and he offered these dictionary definitions as a thumbnail sketch of his overall position:
- Person — A Living (biological state) Human (biological classification). The American Heritage® Stedman’s Medical Dictionary
- Human — A member of the genus Homo and especially of the species H. sapiens. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Others in the conversation take on gengwall’s use of the dictionary and other aspects of his argument that are troubling, intellectually and otherwise (see comments 61, 63, 64, 71; I also should point out that the parenthetical comments in the definition of “person” are his), and so I am not going to repeat what they have said. What interests me is the way in which gengwall’s definition of the fetus fits the description of metaphorical thinking in George Lakoff’s and Mark Johnson’s book, Metaphors We Live By, which I happen to be teaching in freshman English this semester. Basically, Lakoff and Johnson argue that we give structure to the world through metaphor, in terms of both understanding and experience. They point out, for example, that we understand argument in terms of war. Consider these expressions:
Your claims are indefensible.
He attacked every weak point in my argument.
His criticisms are right on target.
I demolished his argument. (4)
Lakoff and Johnson then point out, however, that we don’t just talk about argument like war; we actually experience it that way. Arguments, like wars for example, are won or lost; the people on either side of an argument behave in some ways as if they are at war, taking different lines of attack, for example, or surrendering some points in the hopes of gaining others that will lead to victory. To make this point by way of contrast, Lakoff and Johnson ask us to
imagine a culture where argument is viewed as a dance, the participantsare seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way. In such a culture, people would view arguments differently, carry them out differently, and talk about them differently. But we would probably not view them as arguing at all: they would simply be doing something different. (5)
The next point from Metaphors We Live By that is relevant to the question of fetal personhood is the way that metaphorical thinking, precisely because it “allows us to comprehend one aspect of a concept in terms of another (e.g., comprehending an aspect of arguing in terms of battle), will necessarily hide other aspects of that concept.” Lakoff and Johnson continue:
In allowing us to focus on one aspect of a concept […] a metaphorical concept can keep us from focusing on other aspects of the concept that are inconsistent with that metaphor. For example, in the midst of a heated argument, when we are intent on attacking our opponent’s position and defending our own, we may lose sight of the coöperative aspects of arguing. Someone who is arguing with you can be viewed as giving you his time, a valuable commodity [especially in an individualistic, capitalist society like the US], in an effort at mutual understanding. (10)
So, let’s return to gengwall’s definition fo the fetus as a person, which was also, apparently, the definition endorsed by the South Dakota legislature when it passed what the Washington Post and just about every other paper I looked at called “the nation’s most far-reaching ban on abortion.” Here are the relevant section of the law:
Section 1. The Legislature finds that the State of South Dakota has a compelling and paramount interest in the preservation and protection of all human life and finds that the guarantee of due process of law under the South Dakota Bill of Rights applies equally to born and unborn human beings.
Section 2. The Legislature finds that the life of a human being begins when the ovum is fertilized by male sperm. The Legislature finds that the explosion of knowledge derived from new recombinant DNA technologies over the past twenty-five years has reinforced the validity of the finding of this scientific fact.
There is a lot that one can say about this law, and most of it has probably been said already. The Washington Post counts 97 blogs that have had something say about its article (here are a few worth reading that I didn’t find on the Post’s list), and I have no doubt there are lots more bloggers, both for and against the measure, who have either posted since I began writing this or will post in the near future. What I want to point out is that to call a fetus or zygote or an embryo a human being, a person, an entity identical in its essence to you sitting here reading this or me as I sit (sat) writing it is to engage not in scientific analysis, but rather in precisely the kind of metaphorical thinking that Lakoff and Johnson’s book is about: Because to decide that “the life of a human being begins when the ovum is fertilized by male sperm” (as if it could be fertilized by female sperm?) is to decide that there is a basis of comparison by which something that is radically not like me or you is, in fact, just like me or you.
According to those who support the South Dakota bill, in other words, if you strip away each and every one of the characterstics that make up someone’s humanity/personhood, at least as humanity/personhood has conventionally been understood, with all its messy character traits, for example, (this is what Lakoff and Johnson mean when they say that metaphorical thinking “can keep us from focusing on other aspects of the concept that are inconsistent with that metaphor), you are still left with a set of objective biological traits that make whoever possesses them a person. These traits, as I understand the argument, boil down to the fact that a zygote, from the moment of conception onward, is “genetically whole,” which is not the term gengwall and others would use, but it’s my catchphrase for the notion that the moment a zygote forms, it possesses all the DNA it needs not only to be recognizably human at any stage of its development, but also to guide its development into a human being ready to be born.
There are a number of important things to point out about this very frightening argument: For starters, it dresses up the old biology-is-destiny argument in some very fancy, shmancy new clothes. After all, if a zygote is already a fully fledged member of the human race, which means it possesses an inalienable right-to-life, and if a woman’s body is the only place where that particular human being can grow, then the fact of a woman’s body, not her desires or her choice, is the determining factor of her fate if she becomes pregnant. There is, of course, a long tradition of this kind of thinking running all the way back to the ancient Greeks, who believed in the one-seed theory of reproduction. According to this theory, men ejaculated tiny little people — I think the Greeks called them homonculii, but I am not sure — and when a woman became pregnant, it meant that her womb was warm and moist enough (the Greeks were believers in the four humors) for one of these tiny little people to lodge itself there and begin the process of growing into the child that would be born.
The other old saw touched on by this reduction of our humanity to the genetic material of which we are made is the mind-body (or body/soul) split. It used to be that what made us human, what separated us from “the animals of the forest,” to use an old-fashioned expression to express an old-fashioned idea, was our minds and/or our souls. It was because we could think rationally and/or because we were capable of spiritual awareness, that we were better than dogs and cats, lions and bears, fireflies and cockroaches. To this way of thinking, our bodies were shells we inhabited, and we used them well or not well, morally and ethically or immorally and unethically, and then left them behind when we died. If, however, our humanity inheres in the material fact of our bodies, then neither the rational mind nor the soul can play the role it once did in the spirit-flesh duality. The humanity of the body must be able to make its claims as well, and here is where I think the question of whether Mary was raped by the Holy Spirit and what it means for her to have conceived a child with the god of the Christian Bible becomes important.
Here are the relevant verses from Luke:
26 And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth, 27 to a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary. 28 And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favored, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women. 29 And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be. 30 And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favor with God. 31 And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS. 32 He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest; and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: 33 and he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end. 34 Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? 35 And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. 37 For with God nothing shall be impossible. 38 And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her.
Rather than start with the question of whether Mary consented or could have meaningfully consented to bear God’s child, given the disparity of power between them, I want to start by thinking about the nature of the fetus that grew in her body. I know that there is some difference of opinion, and even controversy, between and among the various Christian denominations over whether Jesus was human or divine or both, whether he was conscious of his dual status (if it was dual), or of his divine status (if he was divine), but this is an internal debate that is not relevant here. What is relevant is that the source of this debate, as far as I know (I am not Christian) is the very anxiety producing fact — for people who believe in a disembodied god — that the male half of the genetic material which produced Jesus had to have come from God’s body or it was a piece of human DNA divinely manufactured inside Mary’s womb; in either case, the material itself, coming directly from God, is divine in a way that, say, my own sperm, which is at least once removed from God, cannot be. In other words, it is not simply the soul that entered the zygote-that-would-become-Jesus at the moment of conception that made the zygote holy; the zygote itself, in its material essence, was holy too.
Replace “God’s touch” with DNA and you have the rationale for life-begins-at-conception by which the South Dakota legislature justified its anti-abortion measure. The DNA, in other words, is a metaphor for inviolate divinity, which means that every normal conception that takes place is, in fact, a metaphor for the conception of Jesus, and every woman who becomes pregnant is a metaphor for Mary pregnant with Jesus, and every act of heterosexual intercourse is a metaphor for the act by which God entered Mary, and every man who engages in heterosexual intercourse is therefore a metaphor for God, and, most importantly, every conceived child, from the moment of conception through the rest of its life, is a metaphor for Jesus himself.
Now, play this out a little further. If I, in my body, in my desire for children, am somehow a metaphor for God of the Christian Bible and his desire for a child, then, metaphorically speaking, I have the same right to conceive that child as God did with Mary. Or to put it another way, to the degree that I am a metaphor for God in my heterosexual relationships, then — again, metaphorically speaking — I have the same power in relation to the women in my life as God did to Mary. Now, please, let me be clear about what I am not saying: I am not saying that men as a class consciously think this way — though I know there are more than a few who do. What I am saying is that if you play the logic of this metaphor out, the description I have just given of the sexual power dynamic between men and women is the conclusion you will inevitably arrive at, and the description I have just given, it seems to me, is no different than an entirely secular description of heterosexual relationships under patriarchy.
Here is where the question of Mary’s consent comes in. Or, to be more accurate, the nature of her consent. Look at these verses again:
28 And [Gabriel] came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favored, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women. 29 And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be. 30 And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favor with God. 31 And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS. 32 He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest; and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: 33 and he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end. 34 Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? 35 And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. 37 For with God nothing shall be impossible. 38 And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her.
Gabriel comes to Mary and tells her that God favors her, and this disturbs Mary. She wonders what kind of a greeting this is — not unlike the way a woman might wonder why a man who has never taken notice of her before is suddenly being so nice to her — and then the angel tells her, he does not ask her, he tells her that she will bear God’s child. Mary says, basically, “I am your servant; I will do as you wish,” a sentiment that you can read either as a statement of fact or as consent. Here’s the thing, though: even if you read it as consent, even if you read it that Mary was absolutely thrilled and eager to bear God’s child, the question of whether, once she was confronted with the omniscient and omnipotent God, she could have felt it possible meaningfully to say no is an open one at the very least. As Barbara put it in the “What If Your Mother Was Pro-Choice Thread” on Alas:
It seems to me that the disparity in power between God and Mary (even if it is just Gabriel speaking) is at least as great as that between the average high school student and her male teacher.
Or, if you happen to live in Utah these days, between a father and his daughter. “Utah lawmakers,” wrote Rebecca Walsh in the Salt Lake Tribune, “refused Monday [February 27, 2006] to make an exception for incest victims in a proposed law that would require parental consent and notification before a girl’s abortion.” Think about what that means: A girl is pregnant because her father raped her; she does not want to have the child; but in order for her to obtain the abortion she wants, and that most people would agree she needs and ought to have, she has to take the risk that her father will be the parent whom either the doctor she goes to or the courts – because she can go to court to override the doctor’s responsibility under the law – will tell what she is planning to do. (And if you take in account the possibility of either domestic violence or her mother’s complicity in the incest, this situation becomes even more complex.) One of the supporters of this legislation had this to say:
Abortion isn’t about women’s rights. The rights they had were when they made the decision to have sex […] This is the consequences. The consequence is they should have to talk to their parents.
In other words, because a woman should not be able to choose to have an abortion, because the life that supposedly begins at conception trumps her life and her autonomy, no matter what the circumstances were when it was conceived, she is held by default to have consented to the act of intercourse during which conception took place.
Now, go back to Mary and God. I don’t think that anyone will disagree that to imagine there was anything like a level playing field between Mary and God is to perform a profound act of denial; more to the point, I also think people will generally agree that to suppose that disparity of power between Mary and God had nothing to do with how Mary thought about what was going on and what was going to happen to her would be, in its own way, delusional. These facts, however, do not mean that one has to read the Biblical passage I quoted above to mean that God raped Mary in the sense that Mary was unwilling and God forced himself on her, but it does mean that one has to take into account the possibility that Mary, because she was God’s servant, would never even have conceived, and might not even have been able to conceive, of the possibility of saying no and that her unwillingness or inability to entertain the possibility of saying no to God would raise questions about whether her consent was fully informed or not. In the logic of the anti-choice movement, however, once she becomes pregnant, the nature of Mary’s consent is irrelevant, because once she becomes pregnant what matters – just like what matters in the case of the girl in the Utah-bill-scenario above – is the child-to-be growing inside her. Taken to its logical conclusion, in other words, the anti-choice logic licenses rape, and it licenses rape, or at least those rapes that result in pregnancy, at least in part because it draws on the metaphorical link between the zygote growing inside a raped woman who becomes pregnant and the zygote-that-would-become-Jesus growing inside Mary in such a way that it erases the significance of the circumstances of the conception.
Read this way, the immaculate conception becomes what Tim Beneke calls, in Men On Rape, a rape sign, an image or narrative through which rape is normalized largely because its rape-related content is so well hidden that people aren’t even aware that it’s there. The example Beneke gives in his book — which, unfortunately, is in storage and so I can only paraphrase — is the image of the caveman dragging “his” woman home by the hair. The humor of the image both hides its violence and establishes the stance towards that violence that is considered culturally appropriate. In the case of the immaculate conception, the holiness of the image both hides whatever questions one might raise about consent and establishes the stance towards sex and conception that is considered culturally appropriate — at least by the anti-choice movement.
It is important to acknowledge that there many other ways to read the immaculate conception, especially because there are seriously progressive, feminist Christian people engaged in the process of rereading their tradition in light of progressive, feminist values. My goal in offering the reading I have outlined here is not to invalidate theirs, or to trash Christianity, but rather to highlight the metaphorical and therefore ideological infrastructure of the anti-choice movement, not only in its misogyny, which would hardly have required this many words to demonstrate, but also in its undestanding of what it means to be human — because if our humanity, all our individual personhoods, has nothing to do with the myriad intangible things that make up the content of our character (and for the purposes of this argument, I do not care whether that content is good, bad or indifferent), but is rather a consequence of the fact of DNA; if I am, in other words, essentially no different from the bundles of cells that result from the coming together of egg and sperm, then protecting the children-to-be growing in the wombs of pregnant women from the “capricious” choices of free-willed women is a kind of retroactive self-preservation; it is a way of making sure that people are born not simply because parents want them, but because they have a right to be born.
The difference is important: In the second, anti-choice scenario, we were, all of us, potential antagonists against our own pregnant mothers, and they were, all of them, potential antagonists against us. On the other hand, if one is not fully human until after one has been born, this pre-birth antagonism doesn’t exist (unless you’re talking about medical issues where the life of the mother and/or the fetus is at stake.) And so to be human, as the anti-choice movement has defined humanity, is on some level to have been at war with free will even before you were born, not so much your own free will, but rather the free will of others, especially of women, and this war, if you accept the anti-choice logic, is one we are all in together, because we all came from the bodies of women, which means that to win the war it is the bodies of women that we need to control. Humanity, in other words, according to this logic, demands the subjugation of women because women hold the power to end humanity. More to the point, this logic implies that to have survived the pregnancy during which you grew to be born is on some level to have escaped women’s power.
The power of a male God, of course, is one sure fire method of ensuring that we keep on escaping, and so is the power of government. Giving the government the kind of power the South Dakota law does, however, can have unexpected consequences. Look again at the first section of the law:
Section 1. The Legislature finds that the State of South Dakota has a compelling and paramount interest in the preservation and protection of all human life and finds that the guarantee of due process of law under the South Dakota Bill of Rights applies equally to born and unborn human beings.
Essentially, it seems to me that this opens the door to all kinds of government interference in our personal and family lives, kinds of interference that I don’t think the anti-choice movement would appreciate. If a zygote is a human being, for example, couldn’t this section of the law be expanded to include the government’s interest in how my behavior effects the health of my sperm, which is, after all, half a human being? (Okay, this may be pushing things too far, but then I thought declaring a zygote a human being would be pushing things too far.) Couldn’t it be expanded to criminalize behaviors a woman might engage in that could harm her child-to-be, like, say, going skiing in the early months of pregnancy? In other words, doesn’t the state’s interest in the preservation and protection of all human life give it the authority legally to regulate the treatment of that life from start to finish?
I think it’s time for me to stop writing and put this up. I do want to say this, though: A guy named John O’Neill wrote a remarkable book called Five Bodies: The Human Shape of Modern Society, that addresses the kinds of questions I’ve been talking about here, though not from an explicitly feminist perspective. Nonetheless, it is very worth reading. The book was originally published in 1985, which is the edition that I read. It has, apparently, been republished in a revised edition. It is worth taking a look at.
[…] Fetal Personhood as Metaphorical Thinking This discussion of abortion politics and pro-life thought, by regular “Alas” comment-writer Richard Jeffrey Newman, develops a fascinating line of thought, using as a starting point a couple of the abortion discussions we’ve had here on “Alas,” and so will be especially entertaining for “Alas” readers. One of the best posts I’ve read this week — check it out. […]
FWIW, the law as written raises molar pregnancies, in which the genetic complement is two sperm and no egg DNA (46XX), or two sperm and one egg DNA (69XXX or XXY, I don’t believe there is a XYY equivalent), to the level of personhood. ( “The Legislature finds that the life of a human being begins when the ovum is fertilized by male sperm.” ) Now there isn’t any “person” there in the 46XX moles, and in 99% of 69whatever moles, the tissue is all modified placenta. But it is the result of fertilization of an ovum by sperm.
It is medically indicated to remove molar pregnancies as soon as diagnosed. Untreated molar pregnancies can lead to uncontrollable and sometimes fatal (to woman) hypertension/strokes, and to development of cancer, which can also be fatal.
Richard — A very thoughtful post. I think you have done a very good job in outlining the pro-life position and the thinking behind it.
“…every act of heterosexual intercourse is a metaphor for the act by which God entered Mary, and every man who engages in heterosexual intercourse is therefore a metaphor for God, and, most importantly, every conceived child, from the moment of conception through the rest of its life, is a metaphor for Jesus himself.”
I liked this part in particular, because this view was how the Roman Catholic Church tried to get control of marriage relationships, especially among the aristocracy, in the Middle Ages. The Church spent literally hundreds of years trying to convince the people of Europe that: 1) marriage consisted of one man and one woman whose union was blessed by a priest; 2) that sexual intercourse was solely for the purpose of bringing children into being and therefore should be confined within the bounds of marriage relationship; 3) that God was at the top of the power pyramid, followed by the priests, then secular leaders, and so on down the whole feudal social ranking system; and 4) the marriage relationship should mirror the relationship between Jesus Christ and the Church, with the man in authority and the woman submitting to him and making sure his wishes were implemented within the household.
So basically we are being dragged back to the Middle Ages. What’s next, a hereditary legislature?
Richard — You are too deep for me, man. Of course, my participation on the Alas blog entry had much more to do with the actual topic. The fetal personhood discussion was, by my own admission, an unfortunate sidetrack. It was, in fact, me that tried several times to pull the discussion back on topic. In that effort, I certainly did not present my full case regarding fetal personhood.
Neither would I do it here since yours is also not a biological discussion, as you point out in the title and throughout. Not that it isn’t a very interesting take. I found it fascinating and have no quibbles with your point of view (at least in the sections my limited mind could comprehend).
You probably do need to brush up on your understanding of Christian marriage and sexuality, as what you describe isn’t very familiar to me even though I’ve been in a Christian marriage for some 25 years now. But, to go down that road would be rather off topic. And we know what trouble that has gotten me into before.
gengwall:
I would not dispute that what I am saying about Christian marriage and sexuality bears very little resemblance to what Christians say about marriage and sexuality; what I tried to do in this post is to follow the logic of the underlying cultural metaphor that I was talking about. That logic is very often at odds with, or is at least not obvious from, what a culture says explicitly about itself. This is true of the Jewish tradition in which I was educated, of US society as a whole, etc.
And as for the full biological argument about fetal personhood: I followed the link that you posted on Alas and read it through several times. I would still submit to you that it is an instance of metaphorical thinking.
This is a very interesting post.
In particular, I find it fascinating that this metaphor actually encompases *two* very old cultural myths. The second you examined at length, but it is the one I missed. I tend to harp on the deep connection of the ‘pregnancy begins at fertilization’ metaphor to Graeco-Roman narratives on reproduction.
I think that, additionally, you are, ahem, right on target when you say that one of the logical outcomes of this kind of metaphor is that ‘society’ must control reproduction to protect its interests against ‘women’. Since the ‘society’ in question is actually a patriarchy, it is literally true that the interests of a (patriarchal) society in reproduction are antithetical to the interests of women.
This is a very perceptive discussion of the problems entailed in “fetal rights” –I really like your focus on the metaphorical constructs that are created and and institutionalized in laws such as that just passed in SD.
If you aren’t familiar with it, you might want to look sometime at Rachel Roth’s book, “Making Women Pay: The Hidden Costs of Fetal Rights”(Cornell 1999) – she doesn’t get into the morality of abortion or the metaphorical issues per se, but she comes to similar conclusions as yours about what happens when we decide to grant fetuses personhood.
Thanks for a thoughtful and provocative contribution to this debate – I will be sharing it.
Thanks for acknowledging that there is a progressive Christianity actively trying to reinterpret the tradition. The tradition itself, of course, speaks with many voices, and being most familiar with the medieval period, what I find startling is how little power your (and the other commenters’ on the original thread — I, of course, was the one who mentioned it in the first place) analysis gives to Mary, compared with the High Medieval tradition in which she was the Queen of Heaven and could talk back to God or anybody.
I find your idea of the connection between God’s impregnation of Mary and all other acts of impregnation to be a bit forced, having always focused on the DIFFERENCE between Jesus’ conception and all others. Which is not to say that your connection isn’t operating on a subconscious level in the psyches of conservative Christian men — though given the recent flap over Bill Napoli’s “sodomized Christian virgin” comments, I don’t know.
Incidentally, the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth are NOT THE SAME THING. (The IC is a ridiculous 19th-century Catholic doctrine that claims MARY was conceived without intercourse.)
I haven’t been able to figure out where identical twins fit in the viewpoint where “every human being is unique and present from the moment of sperm/egg fusion”. Since non-conjoined (non-“Siamese”) twins can form up to 12 days post-fertilization, and conjoined twins for some days thereafter, doesn’t that kind of imply that each fertilized egg is not yet a specific, single individual? Or are identical twins not quite really individual people?
Actually, re: Grace’s comment, the doctrine of the immaculate conception does not teach that Mary was conceived without intercourse – it teaches that she was conceived without original sin, which is a very different thing. (But it is still different than the virgin birth).
In other words, doesn’t the state’s interest in the preservation and protection of all human life give it the authority legally to regulate the treatment of that life from start to finish?
bingo.
there are already criminal penalties for drug use during pregnancy, for behavior that results in the death of a fetus (sometimes making two murders out of one), and some threatened sanctions for smoking or drinking during pregnancy. presume that every aspect of pregnant women’s behavior will be regulated, as the first step to regulation of all behavior of all women…
(and, of course, there’s the biological absurdity that fertilization = conception, as though many of those zygotes didn’t just float down and out and Oh Well…)
I’m sorry if I misread you acm. Do you contend fertilization does NOT = conception. My understanding is that the two terms are roughly synonymous.
Doctor Science — yes, identical twins pose a problem to the personhood argument. So does the opposite phenomenon of twins remerging back into one being.
Frankly, I am not sure how I feel about the first 3 – 4 days or so. Until the embryo begins to differentiate into the blastocyst, it is really a group of identical cells, each of which could technically become a unique organism. In a sense, one group of these cells, each with organismal potential, “sacrifices” itself to become the placenta while the other group becomes collectively the “baby”.
The embryo does not even regulate its own development in the first couple of days.
And regarding implantation, it could also be agrued that the blastocyst doesn’t become an organism until it begins to “feed” by connecting with the mother.
But these are all reasons why it is a facinating topic even outside of metaphorical thinking.
I found a better description than mine of the dilema of assigning personhood pre-implantation. It is in a review of the Gordon Graham book “Genes” by Rob Loftis on mentalhelp.net. I have no idea of the credentials of these people or anything, I simply stumbled acros this. But it does lay out the problem fairly well.
“Now it is possible to develop a consistent account of personal identity that grants moral status to the fetus, but it breaks down when it comes to embryos that have not implanted in the side of a woman’s uterus, an event that takes place 5 to 14 days after conception. Prior to implantation, the embryo is not fully individuated: it can split into twins, and twins can merge into a single individual. In fact, every cell of the very early embryo is totipotent: each can on its own become an adult human being. This means that an eight cell embryo is not a potential adult – it is eight potential adults. This alone makes the moral status issue difficult. How can we grant moral status to all eight of these potential adults? Are we obligated to split them all off to give each adult a chance to come into being? What happens when the cells we split off divide? The issue becomes worse when we think about personal identity. If an early embryo splits into two embryos, and twins are born, are either of these twin babies organisms that once were the embryo? If one of the twins is the same individual as the embryo, then the other must be as well. But that means that the twins are the same individual, and that makes no sense. The only alternative is to say that strong potentiality, the kind of potentiality that might bring moral status, begins at implantation, not conception.”
gengwall — thanks for the details about twinning. I think twinning makes an excellent illustration of our host’s point. Genetic uniqueness is not the definition of a worthwhile human being, it is a *metaphor* for our (IMHO correct) sense that each human person is unique and valuable. Focussing on the moment — whether conception, implantation, or whatever — when the individual becomes either developmentally or genetically unique is letting the metaphor drive.
The immaculate conception refers to Mary’s conception, which actually supports the theory of her complete lack of agency. God supposedly earmarked her for her future job by zapping her “original sin” at the moment she was conceived; her previously infertile parents struck a deal with God in which he would give them a child if in turn they dedicated her to his service. Mary was bought and paid for long before the annunciation; there was no question of her having any choice.
Dave
Interesting topic… I’m working in this industry myself and I don’t agree about this in 100%, but I added your page to my bookmarks and hope to see more interesting articles in the future
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