A modest proposal
Law, Ishmael
A MODEST PROPOSAL A BABY BY ANY OTHER NAME ISHMAEL LAW he National Institutes of Health (NIH) is considering a proposal to beget human lab animals, provided they are destroyed before they...
...Fetus won't work anymore, so they speak of the, fertilized ovum...
...A few years after Roe and Doe, scientists wanted access to these younglings slated for abortion, especially if they could be kept alive for a while after the abortion in order to be used for research...
...Of course, the rule always breaks down in the articles on prenatal care, because you can't coach pregnant mothers into talking about their fetuses...
...They call these very young objects of researchpre-implantatipn embryos...
...ISHMAEL LAW is the pseudonym of an academic who has served as a consultant to the NIH...
...Fourteen days is the age they have selected...
...The concept of & fertilized ovum is as conflicted as a convex basketball...
...the Filipino convicts infected with the plague by U.S...
...A MODEST PROPOSAL A BABY BY ANY OTHER NAME ISHMAEL LAW he National Institutes of Health (NIH) is considering a proposal to beget human lab animals, provided they are destroyed before they reach a certain age...
...The term is unfamiliar...
...Mind you, the NIH is not careless about laboratory animals...
...12 The NIH panel also speaks of the pre-embryo...
...They are aware of some public reluctance to allow humans to be begotten alongside rodents and fruit-flies, used for research, and then, as they say in the lab, "sacrificed...
...The syphilitic blacks at Tuskegee...
...We balance the fact that they—these human beings—are really too little to know or to feel what we are doing to them, against the important genetic discoveries they might make possible for us...
...The current NIH Human Embryo Research Panel uses several other turns of phrase to legitimize an unrestricted period in the earliest days of life when a human being is disposable...
...the lethally irradiated soldiers at Ground Zero...
...What was wanted was to get those little bodies out of the womb alive and work on them in the lab, and so a federal commission began talking about a fetus ex utero: afetus outside the womb...
...But an ovum, as the panelists and their educated readers know, is an ovum only until the moment it is fertilized...
...No human being, we are told, qualifies for moral recognition and social protection as a person just by being a human being...
...Over the years the NIH has labored to find appropriate words to designate humans that they would like to study, so to speak, beyond the ordinary limits...
...In its report, the panel acknowledges that the very young embryo merits moral respect as a developing form of human life...
...The laws and regulations governing their care run to a thousand pages, and their housing costs about four times as much per square foot as decent faculty offices...
...Instead he spoke of the embyro, or the fetus, or the unborn...
...Since the Court in 1973 was removing from the unborn all protection of law, it needed to remove all protection of sentiment as well...
...They will decide whether to fund such research...
...the retarded children injected with hepatitis at Willowbrook...
...But a cancer is a developing form of human life and merits no respect at all...
...After that it is a human being in the zygote stage of his or her embryonic life...
...This panel report will not abate the widespread distrust in what the NIH, in its conflict of interest, calls moral inquiry...
...doctors...
...A fetus who emerges living from the womb is instantly a baby...
...To accredit humans as persons, we who award that status have to calculate, not simply who or what they are, but how much of a burden they are going to be, and whether our best interests are served by declaring them protectable...
...Person, after all, was the constitutional status that had been claimed by so many groups to end their treatment as inferior categories of human being: slaves, free blacks, the landless, women, Indians...
...Most news media imposed "fetus" years ago as the only permissible reference to the newly disposable unborn, and woman as its bearer...
...D 13...
...No Person shall be deprived...
...But the only thing pre- an embryo has is a sperm or an egg...
...Even folks who never read Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary knew that this was weird...
...The precise issue to be decided this December at the NIH, of course, is not whether making human hamsters is moral or legal...
...they referred to the child...
...When references obliged him to refer to the unborn person, however, he placed that word at arm's length by using quotation marks—"person...
...As long as they could use Blackmun's all-purpose fetus word all would be well, for since 1973, one could do whatever one wished with a. fetus...
...That sounds so small and undeveloped as to be insignificant...
...In a bold stroke, the panel finally turns from word-craft to embrace an eccentric theory devised by its theologian member...
...Now they have come up with "pre-implantation embryos...
...And those are not what the scientists want to get their hands on...
...At this point the calculus becomes easy: on balance we have moral respect for them, but more moral respect for what we can gain from them...
...When Blackmun spoke for the Supreme Court, he carefully avoided any such reference...
...This is all word-play intended to render the youngest humans morally negligible and politically expendable...
...No one is perfect...
...Of course, this is not entirely innovative...
...Still, the human hamster is going to be difficult to sell politically...
...they were all unfortunately they, and the prevailing moral calculus didn't award them enough moral respect...
...And they will probably say yes...
...The NIH is equally incompetent in both those disciplines...
...Justice Harry Blackmun, in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton (1973), had to cite many legal sources and medical documents...
...With this "theology" no more bioethicspeak will be needed...
...What commands our respect and protection is not human life, but living human beings...
...It comes down to the same us deciding what the same they is worth—to us...
...I propose that in order to sidestep even the suspicion of exploitation, all scientists funded to beget and use embryonic human beings for research voluntarily agree to use only embryos whom they themselves have sired or conceived, in vivo or in vitro, with their mate as co-parent—all of this done, it is understood, with moral respect, profound respect, but not undue respect To a mistrustful public, to an embarrassed NIH, even to their other children, these truth-seeking researchers can then take deserved pride in the fact that they will not have asked of others what they themselves were not ready to give...
...The fact is that the NIH wants to pay scientists to breed human beings for use as laboratory animals...
...This was so radical an innovation that Blackmun understandably but heedlessly referred to the mother throughout the decision...
...Most journals and newspapers discipline their usage with style sheets...
...They always use the S-word...
...But I offer a modest proposal...
Vol. 121 • December 1994 • No. 21
