The Heart Has Reasons That Reason Cannot Know

The Culture of Life Foundation has published a two-part review of a new book, Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, by Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen. The book is likely to dominate pro-life philosophical arguments for the foreseeable future, and the distinguished reviewer, William E. May, does a fine job of explaining why that is so.

Reading Dr. May's review, however, I had the sense that George and Tollefsen have made the all-too-common mistake of letting their enemies define the grounds on which the argument over the humanity of the unborn child will take place. For instance, in Chapter 5, attempting to establish the "personhood" of the unborn child (or at least to undermine the arguments of those who deny the "personhood" of the child) is simply unnecessary. The burden of proof rests on those who would say otherwise, just as the burden rests on those who say that the sun comes up in the west and goes down in the east. The claim that the unborn child is anything other than, well, an unborn child is modern rationalism at its worst—and any attempt to combat such rationalism on its own terms is bound to fail.

One argument discussed by George and Tollefsen illustrates this point. Some who claim that the embryo is not a "person" point to "the failure to grieve over the death of embryos." There's a simple answer to that: such failure is by no means a universal human experience. Indeed, it's quite the opposite: It's the exception that proves the rule.

Yet George and Tollefsen, as May summarizes them, find this argument

in part based on ignorance of the facts established by embryo science showing that at fertilization a distinct new human being comes into existence; parents aware of these facts do grieve over the early deaths of their unborn children; those aware of these facts who are indifferent to such loss are frequently reductionists who misdescribe embryos as clumps of cells or tissue masses, etc. Emotional responses toward early miscarriages usually results from what one thinks, rightly or wrongly, about the humanity of human embryos and such responses of themselves prove nothing.

This is in some sense a variant of the fallacy that a person who knows that something is moral will do it (and will avoid the immoral counterpart to the action). That is not surprising considering the reliance of George and Tollefsen on Kant's deontological ethics, but there's nothing particularly Christian about this claim (and much that is not Christian). What the authors (just as much as those they are responding to) fail to consider is that such emotional reactions may have bases other than "what one thinks, rightly or wrongly, about the humanity of human embryos."

On the Sunday after Thanksgiving, my wife and I spent most of the afternoon and evening in the hospital. At ten weeks' gestation, our eighth child was in the process of miscarriage. When we left the hospital later that night, we went home alone.

Amy had miscarried once before, several years ago, at five to six weeks' gestation. That experience was hard for both of us, but this was much harder, and not just physically. It may seem odd that four or five weeks could make such a difference, but it does, and the difference has little or nothing to do with one's understanding of embryology. Our seven other children took the news as hard as we did, and only our oldest likely understands biology well enough to know what we know.

Long before scientists were able to peer into the womb, long before the average educated person studied human biology, long before parents in Western nations routinely received ultrasounds at ten weeks' gestation and heard their child's heartbeat (which began at about five weeks), everyone knew, as our children know today, that what is growing in the mother's womb is a baby. And, indeed, that the womb is a mother's womb, because the woman carrying the child is a mother.

I don't remember my mother's other pregnancies (I was not yet five when my youngest sister was born), but I remember the later pregnancies of my aunts, before I knew much of anything about human biology (much less embryology). Did the fact (and yes, it is a fact) that I knew (yes, knew) that my aunts were carrying my cousins depend on scientific knowledge? Of course not; in asking the question, we can see the very absurdity of it.

For the Christian who understands natural law, we know why this experience is universal (and not just among Christians). This knowledge is written on the human heart. The philosophical explication of natural law can help us to understand the experience, but that philosophical knowledge is secondary to the experiential knowledge that all humanity has access to.

That experiential knowledge can be—and certainly has been—darkened by sin and explained away by modern rationalism (even the rationalism of those who should know better—"such responses of themselves prove nothing"). But it exists, nonetheless, as an essentially universal human experience. And the emotional response, far from depending on "the facts established by embryo science," is a reflection of something far deeper, of our common humanity.

Those women who suffer post-abortion trauma do not do so because they have suddenly learned what modern science can tell us; they suffer because they have remembered what they knew all along, but tried to forget. They know, as my wife and children and I know, that there will always be a hole in their lives that the child would have filled.

Yet for us, that pain is blunted by our faith. Christians have other knowledge that is not derived from modern science or from philosophy—indeed, knowledge that modern scientists and philosophers would refuse to admit. We can take comfort in knowing that God can turn the trials and tribulations of our lives to the good, that for those who follow Him, He "will refine them as silver is refined, and will try them as gold is tried: they shall call on my name, and I will hear them: I will say, It is my people: and they shall say, the Lord is my God" (Zechariah 13).