Clumps of Cells

CrowdSource 5.5.2025

and

May 05, 2025

Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: what is a human embryo?

Join us! CrowdSource features the best comments from The Crowd — our cherished readers and subscribers who, with their comments and emails, help make Wisdom of Crowds what it is.

Politics and the Human Embryo

With three meticulously-reported pieces published in the New York Times, journalist Anna Louie Sussman has rebooted the public debate about the legal and moral status of the human embryo.

New Research, Perennial Questions. “Even people who do not equate embryos with human beings,” Sussman writes in her first piece, “may be unsettled by the idea of growing them in dishes to increasingly advanced stages for research purposes.”
Quality of Life. In Sussman’s second piece, about embryo screening, scientists wrestle with the desirability of some forms of genetic testing:

Defining and measuring health, though, are also matters of interpretation. Genomic Prediction’s single embryo health score, for example, weighs the different risks of each disease using the measure of quality-adjusted life years, a common public health metric used to estimate disease burdens on a population level. But what is a quality life?

Property or People. The third article, about the legal status of embryos, describes the conundrums that emerge in lawsuits involving embryos:

In December 2020 a hospital patient wandered into an unsecured room where the couples’ embryos sat in cryogenic storage, picked up the frozen embryos and, stung by the cold, dropped them on the floor. In February 2024 the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that these lost embryos were “extrauterine children” …

The Gray Zone

Sussman’s reporting — as well as her own experience with freezing her embryos and IVF — provoked philosophical questions. “If I am honest,” she writes,

any newfound wisdom I’ve gained along the way has not made it easier to figure out where my embryos belong; I am still deciding how I feel about their eventual fate. … this context is what ethicists and lawyers and philosophers mean when they suggest that embryos are sui generis — ontologically unknowable, forever suspended in a gray zone of meaning and potentiality. Their meaning can only ever be contingent.

“Embryos as Schrödinger’s Persons.” Discussing the embryo’s ambiguous status, Sussman alludes to
Leah Libresco Sargeant
’s work on the logical contortions in our language about embryos:

It will look like a baby, but it won’t be a baby. It will feel like losing a baby, but legally we prefer you not grieve or sue like it was a baby. It can grow like a baby, but in case of abnormality or excess, it has to be able to be thawed and thrown out like it isn’t a baby.

“Independent Human Persons.” Many of Sussman’s critics are pro-lifers who believe she should take a clearer stance on the essential humanity and personhood of the embryo.
- Here’s Emma Fuentes: “… there are points at which the series reads as though Sussman is secretly pro-embryo-rights.”
- Also critical is Emily Washburn: “Embryos are not subjective — they are independent human persons with their own DNA.”
“More Than Property, Less Than a Child.” So writes Sarah Crites, in Sussman’s defense: “Fertility patients know better than anyone the feeling that embryos are something special: more than property, less than a child, clumps of just a few cells that carry the weight of enormous potential for joy and pain.”

The 14-Day Rule

The ethical guideline which prohibits research on embryos older than 14-days exemplifies the somewhat make-do nature of embryo ethics.

Biology and Abstraction. “That cutoff was based partly on biology — 14 days is typically when an embryo develops a structure known as the primitive streak, a sign it will no longer turn into twins,” Sussman writes. “[The rule] was also, mostly, an abstraction.”
The 14-day rule was formulated in 1984 by British philosopher Mary Warnock, in a government report about the ethics of IVF and embryo research.
“Everybody Can Count Up to 14.” In 2018, Warnock defended the 14-day rule:

I’m perfectly sure that if we had tried to describe a stage of development of the embryo which would be the cut-off [then] that would not have worked. Everybody can count up to 14, and everybody can keep a record. It was the simplicity of that rule that made it successful.

Human Embryos and Human Rights

Other thinkers have also wrestled with the question of whether and/or at what stage of development the embryo gains inviolable moral worth:

Michael Sandel

The Harvard political theorist argues that, while they aren’t persons, human embryos still deserve some respect:

Personhood is not the only warrant for respect. For example, we consider it an act of disrespect when a hiker carves his initials in an ancient sequoia — not because we regard the sequoia as a person, but because we regard it as a natural wonder worthy of appreciation and awe. To respect the old-growth forest does not mean that no tree may ever be felled or harvested for human purposes. Respecting the forest may be consistent with using it. But the purposes should be weighty and appropriate to the wondrous nature of the thing.

Robert P. George and Patrick Lee

In a response to Sandel’s article, law professors George and Lee argue that human beings have rights at every stage of development, including the embryo stage:

… no one claims that embryos are mature human beings, that is, adults. But human embryos are human beings, that is, complete, though immature, members of the human species. Embryos are human individuals at an early stage of their development, just as adolescents, toddlers, infants, and fetuses are human individuals at various developmental stages. So to say, as Sandel does, that embryos and human beings are different kinds of things is true only if one focuses exclusively on the accidental characteristics — size, degree of development, and so on. But the central question is, precisely, should we focus only on the accidental characteristics by which embryonic human beings differ from mature human beings, or should we recognize their essential nature (that is, what they are)?

A fascinating account of a debate between George and Sandel can be found here.

Robert Spaemann

According to the German thinker, human embryos are persons and deserve rights because they are part of the human family:

Each of us says, “I was conceived on such and such a date and born on such and such a date,” and children ask their mother, “What was it like when I was still in your tummy?” The personal pronoun “I” refers not to the consciousness of an “I,” which none of us had in the womb, but rather to the nascent living being, the man who only later learned to say “I.” And has learned to say “I” only because other human beings first addressed him as “thou” before he could say “I.” Even if this being never learns to say “I” because of some disability, he belongs as a son or daughter, brother or sister to a human family, and therefore to the human family, which is a community of persons. There is only one admissible criterion for human personhood: belonging biologically to the human family.

From the Crowd

Does America Deserve Trump?
John Haas
adds to
Damir Marusic
’s discussion of whether America in some way “deserves” Donald Trump:

Wonderful meditation, this. A couple stray thoughts:
1) Without a prophet, there’s no way to be certain what triggered the retribution. People’s speculation will fit their priors: What sins (by Old Testament standards) has the US not committed, that might earn it wrath?
2) In the Old Testament, providentialist view of history, a harmful ruler is always a punishment — never an accident. But that’s in the context of Israel being a covenanted nation, something America — despite the “Christian nation!” enthusiasts — is not, or not precisely.
3) Love the Lincoln reference, very appropriate note to conclude with. But Lincoln was rather unusual. Responding to a compliment from a friend, Lincoln wrote, “it is not immediately popular. Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it, however, in this case, is to deny that there is a God governing the world.” Lincoln’s manner of humble inquiry into events — rather than knee-jerk blame toward our enemies — is never popular. For a great look into how most people interpreted the war, see Harry Stout’s Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War. A great read.
4) A natural law view of history — where your happiness corresponds to your goodness — makes sense as an explanation of our recent history. As noted, there are too many national sins to pick from to single any out, short of prophetic insight. But can anyone deny that our desires are distorted, by a natural law standard? If so, a kind of automatic retribution makes sense. But again, absent prophecy, all we have is political categories and values to explain it.

Does America Deserve Trump? (II)
Frank
disagrees with Damir about historical prophecy:

There is no divine intervention. History offers lessons.
The post-Civil War era (the Gilded Age) was characterized by a rapid industrialization and technological progress which brought about massive socioeconomic disruptions and inequalities. In the 1890s, that inequality and wealth gave rise to the idea that people were being screwed over by the robber barons.
These grievances found a perfect expression in the charismatic William Jennings Bryan who became the “populist” candidate for presidency: 1896, 1900 and 1908. He was vilified and dehumanized by the “establishment” for attempting to “destroy democracy.” He never succeeded in being elected to the presidency, but the parallels between late 19th and early 21st are clear: every time there is a seismic economic disruption or change (as has happened over the last three decades or more) there will eventually be some attempt to restore some kind of equilibrium.
Such course correction is good in theory. In democracy people need to have some basic trust in fairness and balance, and that their dignity is not violated. Otherwise, why bother to believe that you have a voice in how things are run. In practice, however, this is difficult to pull off without wrecking the system (the wrong word here is “revolution”). Smart demagogues, like Trump, can (as we see now) tap into those grievances and inequalities without having suffered from them. Bryan was closer [than Trump] to the agrarians and working class people, but the entrenched interests of the establishments back then were more powerful. He lost because he was the right man for the wrong time. Trump won because he is the wrong man for the right time. That’s our tragedy. But revolutionary he is not. Eventually he will fail, because he is hollow in ideas, but for sure he will leave behind a trail of destruction.