The puzzle of the clinic fire
Guest Columnist
Father Tad Pacholczyk
One argument that is often made to justify destroying human
embryos begins like this:
Suppose there is a fire in a fertility clinic. You are the
only adult present, and there is a newborn baby and a tank
of liquid nitrogen with 5,000 frozen embryos in the clinic.
You can save only one of them before the place burns down
— which would you choose?
Only the most passionate and radical extremist, so the argument
goes, would save the container with the embryos instead
of the newborn baby. This seems to demonstrate what advocates
of embryonic stem cell research have been saying all along,
namely, that everybody makes a moral distinction between
embryos and children, and that killing embryos cannot be
on the same moral level as killing children. Embryo destruction,
they conclude, poses no real moral problem if they are killed
for research to benefit others.
Yet it is clear that this argument fails to justify what
it proposes.
We can see this by modifying the storyline slightly. Imagine
three beautiful baby sisters who were just born, lying together
and sleeping in the same hospital bed. The father of these
girls is in the waiting room down the hall. In another bed
next to the girls is their mother, unconscious and recuperating
from surgery. The father is the only person in the hospital
ward, when suddenly a massive fire flares up.
He runs down the hallway to rescue his family, but he can
only choose one bed to roll out of the ward before the fire
completely engulfs the room and makes it impossible to rescue
anyone else. If he chooses to rescue his wife, rather than
his three daughters, does that mean there is a moral distinction
between his daughters and his wife?
Does that in any way imply that he would accept the idea
of his daughters being experimented on by researchers or
sacrificed for science? Certainly not — such a conclusion
would never follow from his action. The fact that he chose
to save his wife would not indicate that he valued his three
daughters any less than his wife, or that he viewed them
as being “less human” than his wife.
It might rather indicate that because he had spent a lot
of time with his wife over the years, he was more emotionally
attached to her, knew the sound of her voice, and on a first
emotional level responded to his lifelong friendship with
her. It says nothing about how valuable his daughters really
are, even to their own dad.
For the case of the embryos who might get left behind, the
same is true: rescuing the infant says nothing about the
embryos’ intrinsic worth and dignity, because the
rescuer may first be reacting to what is most familiar to
him, namely, the newborn baby.
As a priest and bioethicist, I often am asked the awkward
question of what parents should do with their “leftover”
embryos following in vitro fertilization. Parental anguish
and guilt are almost palpable in our conversations as they
struggle to figure out a way to free their own children
trapped in these frozen orphanages.
Having personally met a number of such parents, I am convinced
that some of them, if they had to “face the fire,”
might well choose their own embryos over somebody else’s
newborn. The “family connection” runs deep,
and I have even spoken with men who responded that for the
case of their three daughters vs. their wife, they would
stay in the clinic trying to save the whole family, even
if it meant they would all end up perishing in the flames.
When it comes to a flash decision, then, as the fire rages
in the clinic, this hypothetical case misses the essential
question of what our moral obligations really are towards
the human embryo. Instead, we are facing a hopelessly artificial
and improbable triage situation, which can never be a legitimate
basis for determining or deducing moral principles.
In a frightening and difficult moment, it involves making
split-second decisions, rather than engaging in calm, principled
moral reasoning. As we proceed to make that awful decision,
we may instinctively sense how the newborn baby is already
moving along a path towards becoming an adult member of
society.
Saving the newborn thus contributes to a reasonably certain
future outcome — whereas saving the embryos does not
raise such practical certainty about their future or their
ultimate fate.
Some embryos from the tank might end up being implanted
into their mother’s womb, but still die or undergo
“selective reduction;” some might be destroyed
because they are deemed “unfit” by clinic operators;
others might be handed over to researchers for embryo-destructive
experiments; many might still remain in the deep freeze
indefinitely.
If I were to grab the newborn out of the fire, that action
says nothing meaningful about my thoughts on the moral value
of human embryos trapped in the freezer, but speaks more
to a snap judgment about foreseeable outcomes in a crisis
or triage situation.
This scenario reminds us that making complex moral decisions
under duress is not easy and will necessarily depend on
many factors — the particular circumstances, familial
relations, perceived likely outcomes, and other emotional
details of the case. It also reminds us how the process
of reaching correct ethical judgments does not ultimately
depend on dreaming up exasperating and unrealistic scenarios
as the justification for those conclusions.
The case of the fire in the clinic does remind us, nevertheless,
that embryos are unfamiliar to us, so that we may react
differently to them than we would to a fully formed baby.
But it should also serve to remind us how embryos are not
supposed to be familiar to us, and are not supposed to be
in freezers in the first place, but only in the safe harbor
of their mother’s womb.
This classic argumentative example of the clinic fire ultimately
fails to engage the serious question of the inestimable
worth of each embryonic human, by a kind of sidestep maneuver
that draws us into an emotional response based on what may
be most familiar to us in a moment of crisis.
In our world today, the clinic is not on fire, and we do
not need to make a Solomonic choice between saving embryonic
humans and those who are older. We ought to rather work
towards building a society that cares for and safeguards
them both.
Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk earned his doctorate in neuroscience
from Yale and did postdoctoral work at Harvard. He is a
priest of the Diocese of Fall River, Mass., and director
of education at the National Catholic Bioethics Center in
Philadelphia. See www.ncbcenter.org
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