The Beginning of Life

Many of the most pressing topics in bioethics are scaffolded upon the question, “When does life begin?” How people think about abortion, contraception, stem cell research, and assistive reproductive technologies like IVF is all dependent on how they conceive of the beginning of life, and major ethical divides have opened up based on their answers. Yet, despite the importance and the simplicity of this question—when does life begin—it is not at all clear what we are asking.

While the question is framed in terms of “life,” I suspect there are at least four other connected-yet-distinct concepts that lurk in the background: humanity, individuality, personhood or ensoulment, and the image of God. It is these concepts, in addition to life, that I believe orient our ethical outlook when it comes to abortion and IVF and the like. And so, for each, I want to briefly investigate what we have in mind when we use these words and, hopefully, how those conceptual intuitions might shape our moral affordances.

There is nothing immediately wrong with life being our default term in these conversations—it is, after all, a sacred gift from God and the opposite of death (and therefore a thing worth preserving). For the ancients, life described that mysterious animation we share, that capacity of some things for movement and growth. In modern science, we have more specific criteria for delineating life, including homeostasis and the ability to reproduce. But we know this capacity is not unique to us. We speak of all sorts of other things as having life, of animals and plants and sea creatures, and not only in a personifying sense. Whatever we mean by life encompasses those creatures too—creatures we often have no problem killing. What we seem to be more concerned with is the presence of life for a certain kind of creature, namely, humans.

Thus another guiding question for our ethical concerns is: When is something a human? This question, as with the beginning of life, is a potential subject of scientific debate using scientific criteria (in this case, involving physical descriptors or morphology, DNA and genetic similarity, or the capacity for interbreeding)—but, importantly, any of the criteria for determining a species or determining whether something is living are inherently philosophical, that is, open to disagreement. So again, how we speak of humanness is perhaps more helpful. Suppose you saw two men holding up a photograph, staring, squinting at it, and one of the men pointed and asked, “Is that a human?” What can you imagine the man is asking? Or, better yet, what is the alternative to their question? In most situations the men might have used words like “someone” or “person” (more on that below), but “human” only becomes the preferred term, in my estimation, when the alternative is a non-human animal. Humanity, then, is a useful category for differentiating what we are from our animal neighbors. Also important is how we might describe something as human but not a human—those are human skin cells, that’s a human head, but it’s not a human. Calling something a human has more to do with individualization.

What then might allow us to speak of a thing as an individual, as a thing we might call someone? When does a discrete thing begin? In most circumstances, we’re naturally very good at recognizing one thing as distinct from another, but as with these other concepts, determining an individual can quickly become blurry. Much of what makes something an individual has to do with an arbitrary scope we establish after the fact to distinguish it from other things around it. Nonetheless, the idea of an individual—distinct from their parents, no longer an egg and sperm, not yet decomposed into the earth—is crucial for our moral decisions.

This then leads us to the concept that has received the lion’s share of theological and philosophical attention throughout history: personhood. For many, being able to say something is a person is the prerequisite for saying it has dignity and a right to life. And yet, as you might expect, defining personhood is perhaps the trickiest of all. From the term’s history, we gather a few insights: the word has theological roots, first applied in the modern sense to, of all things, the Trinity and the three persons of the Godhead. It was adapted from its original meaning as a mask, like those used in classical theater. Of note is that the Greek equivalent in Trinitarian theology for the Latin term persona was hypostasis, which can be translated as a center of consciousness. Medievals from Boethius to Aquinas into the Enlightenment would wrestle with this idea of a person, often emphasizing our consciousness, intelligence, or rational will. Ultimately, this seems to suggest that personhood involves being an individual thinking thing and maybe even related to having a face.

Such an understanding seems to line up with how we ordinarily use the term—we tend to only use the term to refer to humans, but when we do choose to personify animals and inanimate things we tend to, either in art or in our imagination, give them something like a human face. And using the same thought experiment as we did with the word “human,” we rarely choose to call a corpse a “person” (unless we’re specifically trying to bestow dignity); at some point, they just become a “body.” Yet being static is not the problem, for we might say, “There’s a person sleeping in there” or “I saw a comatose person in that hospital room.” (Although the latter may only be because we subconsciously conflate sleep and coma, since I can also imagine someone expressing doubt as to whether their brain-dead relative is even a person anymore. In fact, it may be that we tie up a person’s personhood with their inner life of the mind.) It is somewhere between here and our final category that we find our concept of the soul. Inasmuch as a soul is something we assume of those that we interact with, it seems to match up pretty closely with how we think about personhood, but inasmuch as we talk about souls as things that are gifted or spiritually infused, then it seems much more like the image of God.

For most of us, the people we say possess personhood are the same as those we would say possess the image of God—even though these are different concepts. The imago Dei is a distinctively Christian idea, and while there is plenty of debate about how to understand that idea (maybe a post on that in the future), all Christian appeals to the image of God recognize it as (1) something special, (2) something linked to our dignity, and (3) something that roots in God’s grace. Clearly, if we can point at something (someone) and say it possesses the image of God, it is something we ought not destroy. And in most situations, in your daily life, those bearing the divine image are fairly obvious—it’s the human faces you encounter regardless of their relation, status, race, ailment, or disability. But occasionally we see something (a cadaver, an ultrasound) or talk to something (an AI chat client), and we’re less sure. Does even this possess the imago Dei? Is it a person—an individual, a human, a life?

Let me highlight a few implications from this brief investigation. It seems clear to me that life begins very early on, even immediately. But to be more precise, there doesn’t seem to be a moment when there isn’t life—the fetus, the embryo, the zygote, the sperm and egg, the parents, it’s all alive. Well, then, when is it human? Again, it seems, in my estimation, to always be human—any genetic tissue we have within our scope is within the human species, from that kind toward that kind. But “Is it a human?” gets us into questions of individualization. The possibility for twinning seems to suggest that we are not dealing with an individual until a couple weeks in (and the impossibility of viability or autonomy may suggest even later, perhaps even birth), but the numerical distinction between the single zygote and the two preceding gametes can suggest an individual begins at fertilization. When talking about personhood, if we focus on the life of the mind, as most theologians and philosophers did in the past, we either become concerned with brain wave patterns that develop later in pregnancy or we push personhood off until postnatality, when memories begin to form, or language emerges, or their frontal cortex finishes developing. (If we’re linking dignity to personhood, these become much less attractive options.) 

Although I mentioned it above as more of a silly possibility, the connection between a face and personhood provides one more interesting possibility. Mainly, it reorients these discussions of personhood away from capacities or features one has and toward how others relate. It’s less about having a face exactly and more about what faces provoke—that is, a look and a smile, consideration from another. We are persons in virtue of being seen as persons, and others take up the obligation to then treat us as the persons they see (though, sadly, people often fail to do so). This further bears on the conversation about the beginning of life because, in times past, the unborn afforded very little consideration from others on account that no one could see them. Clearly, what was inside a woman was very important and held the potential to become a human with a face and with words and a life we can interact with. But it was not until the last century that advances in technology (thinking especially of ultrasounds) confronted us with the faces of the unborn and different demands began to be made of the outsider.

There is so much more to be said here, especially regarding the image of God, dignity, and the problems we get into when we start to determine who is a person and who is not. I, of course, have suspicions about how all this plays out, but my primary intention has been to demonstrate that the beginning of life is a complicated topic—and so a little intellectual humility (and maybe some extra precision in our words) might go a long way.