Embryonic discourse: abortion, stem cells and cloning.

Abstract: This Article interprets the debate about abortion and the debate about embryonic research and therapeutic cloning as aspects of a larger history of ideas. The Article suggests that embryos increasingly stand for different truths in discourse about abortion on the one-hand and about embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning on the other. More specifically, the Article suggests that the contemporary debate about the meaning of the embryo in the context both of abortion and of embryonic research bespeaks a widespread transformation in Western, and especially American, society during the last three or four decades. At base, that transformation involves displacement of an understanding of personhood, particularly in domestic settings that depended on the submersion of individualism with an understanding of personhood that values autonomous individuality and that envisions community as the consequence of individuals' distinct choices rather than as a pre-existing, hierarchically structured whole.

I. Introduction

Two debates, one about abortion and the other about embryonic stem cell Research (1) and therapeutic cloning, (2) are being conflated in social and legal discourse. The two debates resemble each other. Within each, society has fashioned a context for discourse that allows people to entertain and dispute the scope of personhood and the parameters of community. Moreover, public disagreement within each debate has focused around the meaning of the term embryo. (3)

Those similarities notwithstanding, this Article argues that a fundamental discontinuity distinguishes the two debates. The debate about abortion, framed in response to the needs and demands of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, concerns the preservation of a world view that valued hierarchy, fixed roles, and communal solidarity more than equality and choice--a world view that had been relegated mostly to the domestic arena by the middle years of the nineteenth century. (4) The debate about embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning raises novel questions about personhood. This debate is being framed in response to very different needs and demands than those that defined the central ideological debates of the two previous centuries. In part, the needs and demands of the present century are being constructed in response to society's expanding capacity to disseminate information and to alter biological structures and thus to redefine the essence of being human. In particular, the debate about embryonic research (in comparison with that about abortion) largely assumes autonomous individuality and then focuses on and assesses the nature of the autonomous individual. (5)

In order to disentangle the debate about abortion from that about research cloning and embryonic stem cell research, this Article analyzes the embryo-as-symbol and suggests that the panoply of meanings attributed to embryo serves to elide, or even disguise, the central concerns underlying the complicated, often volatile, and generally confusing debate about abortion and the emerging debate about embryonic research and cloning for the production of research embryos.

Both cloning and embryonic stem cell research have focused public attention on the meaning and status of human embryos in contexts essentially unrelated to abortion. As a result, society and the law have begun to construct new understandings of the term embryo. Those understandings merge with and reshape old understandings. Thus, the politics of abortion are being transformed as society responds to developments in molecular biology, especially the advent of mammalian cloning in 1997 (6) and the isolation of human embryonic stem cells a year later. (7)

Neither discourse about abortion nor discourse about cloning and embryonic stem cell research can adequately be interpreted apart from an underlying ideological shift in American society that became evident in the last decades of the twentieth century. (8) That broader underlying shift implicates the contours of personhood, family life, and community And in consequence, both debates (largely through interpretations of their shared central symbol, the embryo) serve as a pretext for entertaining broader disputes about underlying social goals and values.