Madam, - Patsy McGarry's call for a debate on when human life begins is timely (Opinion & Analysis, September 2nd).
The vagueness he finds in the Catholic Church's stance on conception and abortion is due to the fact that not until the early 19th century was the mammalian ovum identified and its role understood. Only then did it become clear what conception was and when it took place. In consequence, the Church's teaching became less vague.
Modern genetics showed that the full programme for a new individual human entity is contained in the fertilised ovum. As the Vatican document Instruction on Respect for Human Life (1987) indicates, that development has reinforced the Church's confidence in the correctness of its position.
The question is not when human life begins, for modern genetics answers that, but: does each individual human life count as a person? The modern notion of person is not just physiological, but also psychological and moral.
It is not a scientific notion. A person is a human being with intelligence, affectivity, rationality, self-awareness, and the ability to value the self and others. Related to that, a person is a centre of transcendent value, an end in itself, a holder of rights and duties.
An influential current of thought says that an embryo cannot possibly be a person in that sense, and that an individual human becomes a person only by degrees. That sounds persuasive; but not merely does it revert to a scientifically obsolete Aristotelian notion of incremental "hominisation", the idea of "becoming" a person lands us in appalling problems.
An embryo may not "look" like a person, but being a person isn't, on anybody's account, a matter of looks. If there are extra-terrestrial aliens who could be persons, they certainly won't look like us.
Second, it makes being a person essentially a quantitative matter or a matter of degree, so that brain damage, autism, low IQ, being a child or a forgetful elderly person, would make one "less of a person" than others. If personhood is something the individual human being progressively acquires, then it is also something it can progressively lose or fail to achieve fully.
That lands us in the position of holding, willy-nilly, that some of us are more persons than others. Not many of us will be full persons, and even they will be such only for part of their lives. This is radical inequality.
Third, it would make the ethical and legal notion of person theoretically unusable. An 80 per cent or 5 per cent person would have an 80 per cent or 5 per cent right to life. Neither ethics nor law could cope with such complications.
There is an alternative. We start from the assumptions that (a) the normal human being is a person; (b) to be a person is to have a certain moral status and as such is not something determined by empirical science; and (c) all persons are equal. We take it that personhood applies, not to individuals on the basis of their individual "merits" or development, but to individuals simply as members of our species. One counts as a person simply by virtue of being a living human individual, not by virtue of some attributes one might, to varying degrees, acquire later.
At the level of theory, that is the only manageable approach, and at the level of practice, it is the only one morally tolerable. - Yours, etc,
JAMES MURPHY,
Straffan Green,
Maynooth,
Co Kildare.