It makes a refreshing change to hear our health minister refer to an embryo as eight cells, rather than a human or a person. It seems we are finally exploring views that go beyond the dogmas of Christianity and Catholicism.
My answer to Adrian Delia's question regarding the minister's statement is yes, an embryo is obviously human, if it has human DNA. It is not, however, a human being, since a human being is an infinitely complex thing, a microbiome, in fact. Each human being is an ecosystem in his or her own right, containing many more bacteria, viruses and fungi than there are people on the planet. Embryos are much simpler, and for this reason we distinguish between human embryos and human beings.
That an embryo is also alive hardly needs stating. I find it very misleading that those who would protect the embryo at all costs - the 'pro-life' camp - choose to emphasise this trivial fact about it. Embryos are alive, yes, and so are the cows, chickens, pigs and the vegetables that we slaughter every day for food, and the rats, rabbits and monkeys we experiment on for fashion and other trivial matters.
An embryo is defined, philosophically, as a potential human being, a potential person. Potentiality has been understood, since Aristotle's times, as the opposite of actuality. A potential person, then, is not an actual person.
Men, women and children who have been born are actual persons. Perhaps some animals might be persons too. Certainly, if we want to bury them ceremoniously, this suggests that we think of them as such. Corporations are legal persons, and Europe is recently debating whether to grant personhood to robots, while Saudi Arabia has already done so. Personhood, then, is a complex issue, and what exactly counts as a person is one of the main questions addressed in philosophy.
The issue of personhood is tied up with that of rights - those of the embryo, the eventual child, as well as those of the intended and donor parents. I don't know if there is a right to have genetically related children up to the age of 48, but I suspect there is quite a market. Why else would we facilitate embryo freezing (and possibly surrogacy) rather than domestic and international adoption? Technology can be marketed; orphans in India cannot, because they are 'persons'.
To zone in on the current law changes, why, in all the hysteria, has the topic of male gamete donors and their payment not turned up? If surrogacy could exploit women by commodifying them - the 'baby factory' argument - does this make a man who provides sperm a 'sperm factory?' If so, why is this not a problem?
One obvious reason is that there is a very significant difference between the two services. For a start, the man contributes only a few minutes of his life to the act of procreation, whereas the woman gives nine months. Although there might be a very lucrative black market in sperm in some places, perhaps the male contribution to procreation is so minimal - men's donation costs next to nothing, and inflicts little physical or psychological harm - that it is hard to imagine sperm donors being exploited, like slaves.
If that is the case, then I think we need to recognize and acknowledge this fact when we develop our laws and ethics. Women should have a much larger say than men in deciding whether and how to support a new life growing inside them, simply because women play a much larger part in the creation of a child, and endure many more costs to their own well-being. I'm not sure whether they are stakeholders or shareholders, but the point is, women own and endure most of the reproductive process.
Contrary to repeated dogma, life does not start at conception, because fertilized embryos, although they can be conceived in labs, require the support of a living womb. Unless it implants successfully, an embryo will die, just as sperm and ova die if they do not meet.
Life begins, then, if not at birth, at implantation. Until artificial wombs are developed, or womb transplants into men become a thing, any new life is utterly dependent on a woman, and she makes a baby mostly on her own and at her own expense.
If we want to allow men an equal role in procreation, then we must learn to think of every drop of sperm as precious. A successful sperm cell must somehow be equal in value to nine months of gestation and childbirth, and our laws need to reflect that. Pro-lifers cannot have it both ways. Either every part of the reproductive process is sacred, or else none of it is. It is not fair to burden women with the sacred duty of childbirth, when there is no longer a corresponding sacred duty for men to die in battle. 'Sperm is sacred' makes absolute sense, if men want to retain their equality.
The new IVF bill should have men worried about their place in the world. Women will have all the freedom to decide whether and when to have children, whereas men will have to go on relying on women. I know many lovely men out there, desperate to have children, who have all the means, and yet cannot find a willing womb, surrogate or otherwise. Perhaps heterosexual men also have a right to have children and to pay a woman for this?
Women will be able to have children whenever they want to - up to the age of 48. Gone are the days of needing to find a suitable partner. I imagine we will have access to sperm banks; or at least, from what I've read of the new law, there seems to be nothing against paying a man for a sample. Far from being exploited, women have the most to gain from the new IVF bill, whether or not surrogacy is allowed.
There are however, many other victims in all this: the artificially created embryos that are frozen for future use. To return to the 'pro-life' argument, the thought of millions of embryos suspended in an icy existence generates less horror in me than the thought of millions of cows hooked up to machines from birth to death - machines designed to maximise their rate of growth and of reproduction, and then to slaughter them as quickly and as cheaply as possible. The embryos got off lightly, in my view.
I can tolerate frozen embryos in the same way as I tolerate battery farms; with great sadness. I despair at what humans have become. I wonder what Aristotle would have made of the current state of humanity, where many of us cannot fulfil a natural function that we share with all other animals, let alone exercise human reason.
If we were reasonable, we would channel our resources into addressing the causes of the rise in infertility, rather than applying a technological fix to the symptoms. If we were reasonable, we would understand that with global population rising exponentially as it is, it is madness to invest resources in reproduction technology. The human species needs no help multiplying.
Personally, I think if we were reasonable, we would question whether it is even a good idea to bring children into the world in the first place. The world we bring them into is a horror, and that includes, now, even the way we bring them in.
But perhaps frozen embryos are not so awful in some people's view. Perhaps assisted reproduction is more sanitized than sex, and that is why we have chosen this course. Perhaps we are all just looking for a way out of that dreaded question - "Mum, where do babies come from?" Now we can simply reply, "Darling, from the freezer, of course, just like chicken and beef!"