Rock-solid logic.(Embryo: A Defense of Human Life)(Book review)

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Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, by Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen (Doubleday, 256 pp., $23.95)

THIS book is bigger than the sum of its parts. The pro-life apologist and Princeton professor Robert P. George and his coauthor, University of South Carolina philosopher Christopher Tollefsen, don't just make a compelling and rational case--no religious arguments here--for the biological humanity and personhood of embryos. They also demonstrate convincingly that human life matters morally at every stage of existence, simply because it is human. And despite the high academic credentials of both authors, Embryo is no scholarly tome. Instead, while George and Tollefsen write very intelligently and mount their case with impeccable logical precision, the book is highly readable and their argument readily accessible to the average reader.

Their topic could not be more important. Across a broad spectrum of philosophies and ideologies, the unique moral importance of human life is under dedicated siege. Animal-rights advocates, for example, reject human exceptionalism, claiming that according human life unique value is "speciesism," a perceived wrong asserted to be as odious as racism. What really matters, they insist, is the ability to feel pain. Hence, since both cows and human beings experience that sensation, bovines are our moral equals and cattle ranching is akin to slavery.

The concept of speciesism is also accepted in the field of utilitarian bioethics, which might be described as essentially an anti-humanism movement. According to the likes of Peter Singer and the British bioethicist John Harris, being human does not convey value. Rather, what matters is "personhood": a moral status that must be earned by possessing sufficient cognitive capacities, such as being self-aware or valuing one's own existence. Supporters of personhood theory argue that human beings who are not persons do not have the right to life and can be treated ethically as mere natural resources. And this is held to be true at both ends of life's spectrum. Thus, articles in medical and bioethics journals around the world have urged that human beings diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state can ethically be harvested for their organs because they have permanently lost their personhood, while creating embryos through cloning for the purpose of stem-cell research is acceptable ethically because embryos have not yet attained personhood.

Meanwhile, many philosophical materialists deny that species distinctions are even real, given that most of our genes are shared by other mammals, opening the door in some minds to using the most weak and vulnerable people in place of animals in medical research. Then there are the so-called deep ecologists who misanthropically claim that we are a vermin species infecting the living Gaia, the solution to which is a radical reduction of human population to fewer than 1 billion.

It is into this ethical wind shear that George and Tollefsen jump in defense of the moral value of all human life. They do this powerfully by openly asserting the absolute moral equality of what many consider the least of human organisms: the early embryo.