Kenneth Cassar (January 16) disagrees with Carmen Zammit (January 13) about early human foetuses. Zammit argues that they are “human beings with potential”. He holds the opposite view: they are “potential human beings” and, as such, have no human rights.
Zammit claims science supports her. A foetus is “an individual with her/his own unique genetic make-up, who has the basic human right to life”. Cassar fires two shots at this claim.
First: DNA is not necessarily unique because twins have the same DNA. Second: as DNA does its work, there is no brain before the 24th week of pregnancy, so there cannot be consciousness. An unconscious organism, he argues, cannot be harmed because it cannot experience hardship and is beyond caring and, therefore, cannot have any rights for protection.
I agree that DNA is not necessarily unique. If they were to clone me (please don’t), each version of me would have human rights as much as I do. So it is not uniqueness that gives us rights.
But Zammit is correct in claiming that DNA is part of the argument that foetuses have human dignity. Are foetuses potential human beings or human beings with potential?
What is this “potential” we are talking about? In my room, I have an empty drawer. Does it have great potential? Imagine if I were to put in it the Koh-i-Noor diamond or de Valette’s dagger or the Mona Lisa. What potential!
Can I say that this drawer is of great worth because it has this marvellous potential? No, because this potential means emptiness. Greatness, here, comes from the greatness of the objects I put in it.
Does this mean that all potential is just emptiness? If so, should we shut down all football nurseries and ballet schools because they hold nothing but emptiness? No: it is not the achieved greatness that is the basis for human caring and rights. Every human right, starting from the right to free expression to the right to life, is about permitting opportunity, not for rewarding achievement.
It is their possessing the capability of rational and spiritual consciousness that gives unborn people human rights- Charles Pace
Yes, some potential means emptiness. But potential can also be capability, what ancient philosophers very observantly called potency. Like it or not, acknowledge it or not, many things around us change, not because they are empty and something ready-made comes from outside and fills their emptiness, but because they have in themselves a capability to become better, richer, more developed, more fully expressive of what they are – if given a chance.
A seed becomes a tree because it possesses the capability of becoming that grand thing in which birds shelter and that humans admire.
Cassar would surely retort: can’t we say the same about sperms, that also have the capability of becoming a person? Should we then give human rights to sperms? No, because DNA shows that sperms are a different organism from the born human, even while the latter is the same organism as the embryo and foetus.
In truth, this ‘continuous but changing human being’ is a little like the frog of the story, waiting to become a dashing prince when touched by a kiss. But it is not a sub-human frog waiting for outside magic to make it what it is not. It is a human organism with the capability, that it already has, to achieve rational and spiritual consciousness.
It is their possessing – already and really, in their dignified selves and not in fairy-tale imagination – the capability of rational and spiritual consciousness that gives unborn people human rights, which are always a matter of allowing opportunity, not a reward after succeeding.
Charles Pace is a social studies academic.