From Knight-Ridder, via blog.bioethics.net:
“A federal appeals court has refused to reinstate a 1999 lawsuit that was filed on behalf of frozen embryos in an effort to block stem-cell research, saying Bush administration policies make the case moot.
The Hagerstown-based National Association for the Advancement of Preborn Children – or NAAPC – sued the federal government on behalf of “Mary Doe,” a name it chose for the nation’s estimated 400,000 frozen embryos. The suit said those embryos were threatened by the research, which requires that an embryo be destroyed to get its stem cells.
“You see, Mary Doe is coming into court and she says, ‘I’m alive, and I’m a human being. Stem cell research is killing my brothers and sisters, and I may be next in line,'” said Rudolph M. Palmer, who founded the Hagerstown organization about 15 years ago.
The suit claimed that it was unconstitutional for the government to fund the destruction of embryos, which it said are people who deserve the same rights as other Americans. It asked the government to “cease and desist any and all plans to undertake human embryo (stem cell) experimentation.”
But a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to address the ethics of stem-cell research, agreeing Tuesday with a lower court that the issue was moot since it hinged on outdated Clinton administration policies.
(…)
But Palmer said the extra embryos should all be brought to term by willing mothers. He said he will continue to fight, and plans to appeal Mary Doe’s case to the Supreme Court.
“She is asking that the court recognize her right to protest her own destruction at the hands of the federal government with federal funds,” he said.”
I assume that when Palmer says that Mary Doe is coming to court, he is speaking metaphorically. Whether “Mary Doe” is the name of a single frozen blastocyst or the class of roughly 400,000 frozen blastocysts (it’s hard to tell from the article), it would be pretty hard to detect her presence in court if you didn’t know where to point your microscope. And it’s very lucky that she has Palmer to speak for her, since, alas, Mary is incapable of speech herself. Not that Palmer can claim to be expressing her thoughts, exactly: Mary has no thoughts, since she doesn’t have a brain, or even a single neuron to call her own. For this reason, it isn’t clear what would be gained by giving Mary the right to protest her own destruction at the hands of the federal government: she could hardly decide to exercise it, nor is it clear what form her protests might take.
If Mary were granted this right, no doubt Palmer would try to protest on her behalf. But if Mary is, in fact, a person for the purposes of the law, then it’s not clear that Palmer would have the right to do this. I can lodge a protest, or bring a suit, on my own behalf. If I am incompetent to do so, a legal guardian can be appointed to represent my interests. Has Palmer been appointed Mary’s legal guardian? If not, what standing does he have to represent her interests in court? Does he worry at all that Mary might not welcome his claim to speak for her? Would he do march into court and claim, with absolutely no authority, to speak for anyone he actually regarded as a person, without worrying about how that person might respond?
I understand and respect the view that we should not destroy human blastocysts for the sake of medical research and therapy, though I disagree with it. But I do not respect people who pretend that blastocysts are something they aren’t, especially when that pretense actually relies on its own falsity, as it does in this case. Claiming to speak for someone when you have made no effort to figure out whether they actually hold the views you attribute to them, and when you have no standing whatever to represent them, would be wrong in any context in which the person you claim to speak for had thoughts at all. The only reason that Palmer can claim to ‘speak for Mary’ without noticing how insulting this would normally be is that he knows perfectly well that she has no thoughts, no brain, and no neural anything, and so she can hardly be expected to take offense.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to file a lawsuit on behalf of some of Palmer’s neurons, who are deeply offended at being associated with these sorts of silly thoughts. If you don’t believe me, just ask them.
While I totally agree with you about the lawsuit, only people who have been born have rights. I do have to quibble (well more than quibble) with this:
For this reason, it isn’t clear what would be gained by giving Mary the right to protest her own destruction at the hands of the federal government: she could hardly decide to exercise it, nor is it clear what form her protests might take.
I can think of many situations where the attorney is not able to “claim to be expressing her thoughts” people with severe retardation, someone in a coma or a newborn infant, for example.
“no standing whatever to represent them” – attorneys do not need standing, plaintiffs need standing. If Palmer is arguing that these embrios have civil rights then he is free to argue that before the court.
Could just anyone get up in court and claim to represent me? I would have thought that in a case involving a normal (i.e., born) person, one would have to in some way be empowered to speak for the person, whether by being her attorney, her legal guardian, or something. No?
Excuse me, but is this guy for real?
I mean, “National Association for the Advancement of Preborn Children”?? And, “But Palmer said the extra embryos should all be brought to term by willing mothers.”
Are you sure he isn’t a trickster, a la Father Guido Sarducci?
Can I sue a woman who miscarries after some (marginally) risky behavior on behalf of her embryo? And what about the non-implanted fertilized eggs? Don’t they have a right to receive the best possible medical treatment, namely, to be – ahh, forget it.
So just to be clear on why I said what I did about ‘expressing her thoughts’: if I represent a comatose person, I might have some grounds for saying something about either her past thoughts, which she presumably had, or her present interests. In the case of a newborn infant, again, I can speak of her present interests, which she clearly has: it is, for instance, not in her interests to be made to suffer. In the case of Mary, however, there are no past thoughts, no present interests (in any sense of ‘interest’ that involves sentience or consciousness, or the values she espoused earlier in her life, etc.) There is nothing whatever to go on in attributing ‘thoughts’ and so forth to her, and no reason to think that she has some that we for some reason can only guess at. It’s a pure fiction, in a way that speaking for the comatose is not.
Hilzoy: And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to file a lawsuit on behalf of some of Palmer’s neurons, who are deeply offended at being associated with these sorts of silly thoughts. If you don’t believe me, just ask them.
You rock.
In the case of a newborn infant, again, I can speak of her present interests, which she clearly has: it is, for instance, not in her interests to be made to suffer.
But it goes beyond suffering. Every person has rights and if you have suffered at the hands of another you deserve to be compensated.
Palmers problem is that he argues that an embryo is a person with rights. Which, as far as I know, has never been held be any court. Indeed, without a law making harm to a fetus a crime someone who intentionally caused a miscarriage would face no criminal charges (for the death of the fetus, at any rate)
As far as when an attorney can represent someone, that is a thornier question in this regard. But I assume that any lawyer who wishes can vindicate the rights of a person. That being said you are of course able to fire your attorney if he does things that you did not ask of him.
As you can see this is why the whole embryo thing seems so weird. On the other hand imagine some rich guy comatose, on life support. The gold-digging wife and deadbeat kids want him found incompetent so that they can take over the family business. The business does not want that and the board of directors pays for an attorney. At this point we don’t know what Mr. Moneybags would prefer, he can ask for an attorney nor can he supervise him or her. Yet I don’t think anyone would object to the representation in that situation.
In that situation we assume that he wants to keep control of his business affairs. Likewise, Palmer assumes that the embryos would argue for their right to existence (tort or civil rights) if they could speak for themselves.
(also everyone should keep in mind that there are probably lawyers here that can articulate this much better than I can)
“Palmer assumes that the embryos would argue for their right to existence”
Das beste wäre, nie geboren sein.
Rilkefan:
it is too bad I can’t find a translation for this. (and am too lazy to translate it myself) but it is always good to meet another Heine fan:
“My wishes are: a humble cottage with a thatched roof, …a good bed, good food, the freshest milk and butter, flowers before my window, and a few fine trees before my door; and if God wants to make my happiness complete, he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees.”
– Heinrich Heine
“But I assume that any lawyer who wishes can vindicate the rights of a person.”
I cannot imagine that this is even remotely the case.
It’s not a blank slate, however, as I believe this issue came up early in connection with the Hamdi case — or maybe it was another detainee. (My recollection is that there was a problem that had to be fixed, so that one cannot assume, if it was Hamdi, that the fact of S. Ct. consideration resolves the matter).
I remembered correctly: http://laws.lp.findlaw.com/getcase/4th/case/026827P&exact=1
The Fourth Circuit dismissed the first Hamdi case for lack of evidence that the lawyer had the requisite relationship with Hamdi to appear on his behalf. Hamdi’s father did, though.
This is the Doe opinion, in pdf. It’s 11 pages, and a straightforward little piece on mootness, for those of you who wonder how that works. I hope the link works for people without a PACER account.
http://pacer.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinion.pdf/032254.U.pdf
Odds of cert being granted are long indeed — measured in light years, rather than inches.
I wonder if someone could bring suit to prevent a cancer surgery, on the basis that cancer cells are alive, they’re human (in that they occupy a human body and are composed of human-body cells), and potentially persons in their own right (if you can say that about undifferentiated cells, why not about cancer cells?).
Yes, the science is sloppy and absurd on its face. But so is the science employed by the Right in abortion, evolution, global warming, and endangered-species policy.
Honestly, if I had a few extra thousand dollars, I’d do it.
Anybody know of a PAC with a terrific sense of humor and mischief?
That’s brilliant Casey. If I win powerball, I’ll send some your way. In the meantime, maybe you should try to hook up with “Jude Finisterre.”
There is a clear definition of when life ends: when the brain stops working. Snide comments aside, brain death has a rigorous definition and can be distinguished from being comatose or even in a persistent vegetative state, from which occasional miracle recoveries can occur. Why not have a similar definition of the start of an independent human life as the time at which brain activity starts? It would be a little more difficult to determine when the very first activity is, but it is clearly sometime after the first stationary neurons form at (if I remember correctly) about 6-8 weeks gestation. Frozen embryos clearly do not have neurons or any other structures capable of forming thoughts so I really don’t see any problem using them for medical research or treatment.
If it is immoral to use embyonic stem cells or abandoned frozen embryos for medical research, is it also immoral to use cultured human cell lines? They are just as alive and human as embryos. They aren’t totipotent, but neither are any cells (except the gametes) in adult humans and no one is arguing that adult humans aren’t people are they?
The elephant in the living room (well, people have brought it up before now, just not the ones who want to ban stem cell research) is that these embryos won’t be brought to term whether or not they are used for research. There is no coherent argument for banning stem cell research on the basis of the embryo’s rights that doesn’t inevitably imply a ban on IVF. I’d really like to see the Right try to make that one fly in the court of public opinion.
This is one of those issues that I suspect one can make powerfully emotional arguments on both sides. On the one hand, these are potential lives (by the arguments of some); on the other, these are potential lives that won’t be baptised, for instance, and hence fall into a theological grey area. If you’ve got strong religious beliefs and hold that disposing of these embryos (if that’s even the right word) is criminal, imagine the consequences.
And on the gripping hand, these are embryos that are almost certainly not going to be brought to term by the parents, and (if there’s any legal authority in the matter) almost certainly won’t be allowed to be brought to term by anyone else by those very same parents. When deadlocked like this, the easiest thing to do is nothing, and to take steps to make sure nothing is done, ever.
<snark>
I don’t understand why there’s this fixation with fertilazation. There are billions of potential babies waiting to be born out there in the form of gametes that are allowed to die every month. It’s a crime of genocidal proportions that this slaughter is allowed to continue year after year. Every one of those little babies should be fertilized and brought to term.
</snark>
Don’t go there, ++!good. Or, we can make it an open thread, and we can discuss the death penalty for wanking.
Slartibartfest is a Niven fan. Excellent.
But I would argue that your two right hands fall on the same side of the argument – namely, that the embryos are already considered living beings. Perhaps I misread, but one of the points might address the potential lives saved by the research, as opposed to the question of the embryos’ fates and the potential lives they represent.
As to the theological question – hmm. Hadn’t thought of that particular one.
And sperm don’t count. That’s just God being massively redundant. It’s all about the eggs.
CS
Well, Mormons spend a fair amount of time trying to baptise their ancestors by proxy, so perhaps pro-life activists like Mr. Palmer (see later thread) can try to figure out a way to baptize all the little frozen blastocysts without the water defrosting and thereby killing them…
Personally, I do not regard human cells as the sorts of lives in need of protection until they achieve sentience. When I ask myself, self, what exactly is wrong with killing a person?, more or less all the answers turn either on sentience, consciousness, or previous consciousness; and since the latter two are, in humans, not present before the first, that’s where I draw my line. As Dianne noted, we use brain death as a criterion for someone’s not being there anymore; I tend to agree that this works (broadly) as a way of telling when the person we need to protect comes into existence.
Two caveats: first, once a person is already around, so to speak, I think their various goals and aspirations and plans and projects are relevant to how we should treat them, and therefore if, for instance, it turned out that there was some form of very very deep sleep in which all forms of consciousness shut off temporarily, that would not mean that at that moment we can e.g. kill the deeply sleeping person with impunity. But this isn’t relevant to blastocysts, since they don’t have any plans, aspirations, values, etc. Second, I believe in being on the safe side about when sentience appears. (And third, I guess: that a sentient fetus deserves protection isn’t meant, here, to answer the question: might that need be outweighed if, say, the life of the mother is at stake? To which I answer, yes.)
As Captain Sunshine pointed out, it’s also very important to consider not only the blastocysts but also the people whose lives could be saved by the research. It is true that no therapies have yet been developed using embryonic stem cell research, but that’s partly because the research has been slowed down so drastically by the politics. Every researcher in this field I talk to is, on the one hand, very careful not to give people false hope, but, on the other, convinced that embryonic stem cells are incredibly promising, and not replaceable by anything else we know of.
(Though many of them also suspect that what we learn from embryonic stem cell research might help us to move beyond the need for them. They are incredibly powerful for researching how cells differentiate, for instance. If we understood this, it’s not inconceivable that we could figure out how to make cells that have already differentiated — skin cells, for instance — turn back into stem cells, or into other kinds of tissue cells altogether. So embryonic stem cells might be necessary only as a sort of bridge technology.)
Don’t go there, ++!good.
Slarti is a C++ programmer. Or a Java programmer.
I’d have said ++(!good) though. One can never trust precedence.
I’d have shortened it to “1”, if “good” can be assigned “true” logic.
C++, I wish. C, mostly. The rest of C++ that doesn’t include C as a subset isn’t exactly beyond me, but I don’t use it all that much.
Lower value in numbers?
Not that that’s meaningful to those in other faiths. They spend quite a bit of time baptising the ancestors of others by proxy, too.
Hey, as long as they’re baptized prior to death, everything’s copacetic.
“if, for instance, it turned out that there was some form of very very deep sleep in which all forms of consciousness shut off temporarily, that would not mean that at that moment we can e.g. kill the deeply sleeping person with impunity”
There isn’t any such state except death. Even a person in the deepest sleep, comotose, or in a perisistent vegetative state has some brain activity, though possibly only brainstem in the last case. Well, actually, there are two sort of exceptions: a person with a barbituate overdose can have a completely null EEG as can a person with severe hypothermia, yet both can be brought back to life occasionally.
Dianne: well, yeah, but absurd hypotheticals are a philosopher’s stock in trade 🙂
“the death penalty for wanking”
By the same logic, shouldn’t there be the death penalty for celibacy? All the little sperms are recycled if not used…denying them even their 1/(very large number) chance of fertilizing an egg and surviving (in an altered form). In women, the situation is a little better…celibacy is only murder a few days of the month. Yet “pro-lifers” are usually also “just say no to sex” types. How can that be?
If you think of them as a sort of Einsteinian thought experiment, there should be no question that absurdity isn’t relevant here. If you want absurdity, just check out the problems in high school calc where a cannonball follows a parabolic trajectory.
Here’s where you screwed up: assuming there was any logic involved. Think of it as an escalation of illogic.
Slart — yeah, we just use them for illustrative purposes. As I was writing, it occurred to me that someone might say: but wait, can I kill people in their sleep?, to which (imho) the answer is: no, and not just because sleep isn’t deep enough; it’s because I have the right to direct my life as I see fit, and once I have gotten started on the project of figuring out what sort of life to lead, minor gaps in consciousness do not give anyone the right to call my life to a halt. At this point I could have taken the time to think out an example that actually occurs, but since I could make the very same conceptual point without bothering, I did.
I suppose this is sort of like those equally improbable frictionless trajectories I used to study in high school physics, now that I think of it.
C++, I wish. C, mostly. The rest of C++ that doesn’t include C as a subset isn’t exactly beyond me, but I don’t use it all that much.
Ah. Well, then may I suggest
And that, ladies and gentlement, is the geekiest pun ever made. Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week, you’ve been a lovely audience.
That was awful. You should be ashamed.
And yes, as far as I’m concerned, the geek quotient is roughly equivalent to putting an X on a triple letter score, and getting a triple word score on top of that.
Sperm don’t count, because the absolute vast majority of them have no shot at life at all. There’s just too damn many of them. What is it, 300,000,000 of the little buggers per “event?” (Must play nice with the posting rules.) Or more! That’s a combination of God’s own massive redundancy in human engineering, and the human lottery of genetics. Built-in waste for the greater good. And I don’t need to borrow any more guilt, thank you.
It’s all about the eggs, really.
CS
For those of us who aren’t geeks, is a translation available?
(Actually, I was a programmer once, briefly, and at a certain point I just asked myself, self, would you like to do this forever and make serious money, or not? And I chose not. That was in 1981. I coulda been a contender… but where would have been the fun in that?)
For those of us who aren’t geeks, is a translation available?
I’m astonished that anyone cares 🙂 And you’ll regret asking…
In C, C++, and Java, a simple way to increment a variable (say the variable “count”) is to use a “++” on it. For example,
int count = 10;
count++;
“count” will now contain 11. Now, while my nom de blog is actually in reference to George Orwell’s concept of Newspeak from 1984, Slarti demonstrated geekiness by changing my name from “++ungood” to “++!good”, the symbol ‘!’ meaning “not” when evaluating logical expressions.
I further upped the geek scale by including a precidence operator like so : ‘++(!ungood)’, which I won’t bother explaining, as it was lame.
The incredibly geeky pun at the end is where I changed the name to ‘++(!uuid)’. A UUID is a Universally Unique Identifier. Microsoft’s version is called a (wait for it) GUID , or Globally Unique Identifier. So I was punning myself as ‘++(!guid).’
Chortle.
Okay, I haven’t felt this geeky since Audio Visual Club in high school.
Good Court.
OMG. We didn’t actually have a club, I was just the guy that helped run off tests, fix projectors, etc. I’ve become just a little less of a geek since then.
Oh, and I was on the chess team, for a while. Until I got good enough at swimming that swim practice pretty much took up all available time.
Oh, and I was on the chess team, for a while.
Ahem. President of the Chess Club speaking. Also a member of the Star Trek club, and a LOTR fanatic, and Avalon Hill wargamer. And was in the slide rule club for a month or two until we disbanded due to the newly available electronic calculators making our meetings redundant.
I’m better now, I swear.
Damn. Are you me, or something?
I wasn’t president, or even close to it. But I did beat our second-rank player once, in a fool’s mate. Overconfidence did him in. He had reason to be overconfident, I’ll admit.
I once owned a slide rule, but there wasn’t a club. Middle school. Everyone else was getting those newfangled TI-30s, but I couldn’t afford one. Plus, slide rules were so retro.
Plus, slide rules were so retro.
That would make me also retro, as they were used in my grade 8 math class. I started collecting them last year. I tried to show some younger coworkers how they worked, explaining that this was the standard tool for doing math before 1970, and they looked at me like I was insane. I even have a cool little addiator that they declined to be interested in.
Damn. Are you me, or something?
Unless you’ve suddenly become a socialist, I think I can spot a difference 🙂
hilzoy:
Well, Mormons spend a fair amount of time trying to baptise their ancestors by proxy, so perhaps pro-life activists like Mr. Palmer (see later thread) can try to figure out a way to baptize all the little frozen blastocysts without the water defrosting and thereby killing them…
As (one of) the blogosphere’s Mormon theology experts, let me point out that Mormon can’t baptize people without names. That’s the point of all the geneological research: coming up with names for the proxies. (And yes, I know that it would be a lot easier for the Mormons just to run a name-generating computer program, but there are rules involved.) So in the case of the embryos, you’d still get into an ontological quandry: are these beings deserving of names? For the most part, Mormons seem to be skeptical of that claim. Orrin Hatch, for example–not the most progressive thinker in the world–broke with his party to support stell cell research.
That’s the point of all the geneological research: coming up with names for the proxies.
My feeling is that once people die, they’re dead. Anything that happens to people after they’re dead is fine so long as it comforts those who mourn.
But if I did believe that anything persists after death, I’d find this particular Mormon practice quite distinctly insulting to the dead, and disturbing in what it says about what they’re prepared to do to those who cannot protest.
When prominent Jewish organizations found out about that particular angle of Mormon geneology, they opted out of being saved, thank you very much. So no Jews get baptized by proxy by the Mormons, for very much the reasons you bring up.
According to the eschatology, the dead get a choice to accept or reject the baptism in their names–but of course the assumption is that the Mormons are right about the afterworld and that the dead will have been converted by the time the geneologists get to them.
(Just explaining, not defending.)
Just explaining, not defending
Sure – the explanation is appreciated. The more I find out, the more I’m inclined to go “religion is weird!”
And on a purely atheistic level, if it comforts Mormons to believe they’re bringing their dead ancestors to heaven with them, well, who am I to argue?
It’s just that overriding someone’s religious decisions when they’re no longer able to protest it seems wrong – even if they’re dead and past caring. Like burying a Jew in a Christian graveyard because the Christian grandchildren don’t like to think of granddad being Jewish: on the one hand, if it comforts the grandchildren, why not? On the other hand, the grandchildren ought to have respect for their grandfather’s religious/cultural heritage, even though he’s now dead and their disrespect can’t hurt him, and even if they never shared it.
The dead live on in people’s memories of them, in the written records: this I do believe. Tampering with people’s memories of the dead, messing around with their records – this seems wrong to me.
It does seem wrong from many humanist perspectives. And I’m guessing that many Mormons have worked this problem over at some point in their lives. I certainly remember going through some theological gymnastics about it.
However. These ceremonies happen in the Mormon temples and are therefore hidden from public view. The families of those dead baptized by proxy probably never know about it. I don’t know if that makes things better or worse.
The geneological research is another strange twist. Because of this theological imperative, Mormons have collated perhaps the best private geneological database in existence. It’s open for consultation to anyone. I’m not sure if this collection of names and data represents “tampering with” the written record and people’s memories. The fact that the point of the geneological collection is to get names for baptism is unsettling, yes.
But then if you don’t believe that the Mormon eschatology has any validity, why should you mind if someone is dunked in a vat of water in the name of your great-great grandmother? (Or perhaps, “has been dunked,” as for all either of us know, it’s already happened!) If the Mormons are wrong, nothing has changed. If the Mormons are right, your great-great grandmother has the choice in the afterlife to accept or reject the ceremony.
In my jackmormon phase of life, I’ve come to believe that this particular practice is mostly harmless. It seems kinda analogous to some evangelist muttering prayers over the names of everyone in the phone book…
(The Mormon vision of afterlife is one of the weirder. It’s a peculiarly American vision of checks, balances, and second chances.)
“The Mormon vision of afterlife is one of the weirder.” — I recall once, in Salt Lake city, seeing a picture of one of those rooms in the Temples that are supposed to give worshippers a foretaste of what heaven will be like. If memory serves, it looked a lot like a hotel bedroom decorated by someone with an infinite budget and no taste whatsoever. And I thought: the idea that this should be in some way appealing is really, really strange.
kicks ass
Hi! Im Mary, And…