3
Dear Valued Constituent
You No Longer Qualify as a Person
Science fiction writer Philip K. Dick is highly respected for his many short stories that have been turned into movies, including “Blade Runner,” “Minority Report,” and “Total Recall.” But one story exposed him to intense public criticism and controversy.
It was titled “The Pre-Persons.”1
Dick composed the story shortly after the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, and his purpose was to highlight the difficulty of defining personhood. As we saw in chapter 2, once the concept of personhood is detached from biology, there is no objective way to draw the line—no point at which we can logically say, “Up to this point, there was merely a human, but now it has been magically transformed into a person.”
In Dick’s fictionalized America, the age at which a child could legally be aborted had been relentlessly pushed forward. First, abortion was legal only in the early months of pregnancy. Then the later months. Then the abortion lobby argued that even newborns were just expelled fetuses.
“Where was the line to be drawn finally?” muses a character in the story. “When the baby smiled its first smile? When it spoke its first word or reached for its initial time for a toy it enjoyed?”
Lawmakers kept moving the line from one arbitrary stopping point to the next, until finally they decided the right age was . . . twelve years old. The age when you can do algebra. That’s when you have the cognitive capacity to qualify as a person. “Up to then, it was only body, animal instincts and body, animal reflexes and responses to stimuli. Like Pavlov’s dogs.”
Up to the age of twelve, then, children were pre-persons and could be killed for any reason. If parents decided they did not want their child any more, they called the local abortion center. It would send a van to collect the child, like a dogcatcher, and take him or her to be euthanized. The procedure was called a postpartum abortion. The van was even equipped with a Good Humor–style jingle, playing nursery school songs. Read the first few lines of the story:
Past the grove of cypress trees . . . Walter saw the white truck, and he knew it for what it was. He thought, That’s the abortion truck. Come to take some kid in for a postpartum down at the abortion place.
And he thought, Maybe my folks called it. For me.
He ran and hid among the blackberries, feeling the scratching of the thorns but thinking, It’s better than having the air sucked out of your lungs. That’s how they do it. . . . They have a big room for it.
For the kids nobody wants.2
The point is that when the concept of personhood is detached from biology, it becomes arbitrary, with no objective criteria. Eventually, the definition of a person will be enforced by whichever group has the most power, using the instrumentalities of the state. If an unborn baby is not a person, what about children already born? What about people with disabilities? People who are terminally ill? The mentally ill? The elderly?
Ultimately, we are all at risk. The main character in the story reflects, “What was so sad was the sight now of the small child playing bravely in his yard day by day, trying to hope, trying to pretend a security he did not have.”3 Once human status is not enough to guarantee rights, we are all like those little children, pretending to have a security none of us has.
When Christians argue ethical issues in the public square, they are not seeking to impose their values on everyone else, as they are often accused of doing. They are not seeking power and control for themselves. Instead they are working to protect human rights in ways that benefit everyone. In this chapter we will see how personhood theory, which was first applied to abortion, is now being applied to a host of other issues, from euthanasia to selling fetal tissue, from stem cell research to animal rights, from genetic engineering to eugenics. Personhood theory is the concept driving threats to the dignity of human life today.
Euthanasia Vans
No doubt, Philip Dick intended “The Pre-Persons” as dystopian fiction. But life often imitates art. In 2015 British columnist Katie Hopkins began to call literally for euthanasia vans. “We just have far too many old people,” Hopkins said in an interview. “It’s ridiculous to be living in a country where we can put dogs to sleep but not people.” Her proposed solution? “Easy. Euthanasia vans—just like ice-cream vans—that would come to your home.”
Hopkins is being deliberately provocative, but she is also serious. “It would all be perfectly charming,” she said. “They might even have a nice little tune they’d play. I mean this genuinely. I’m super-keen on euthanasia vans.”4
I’m sure she is . . . until one comes for her.
Hopkins’s reference to ice-cream vans playing tunes makes me think she may have read “The Pre-Persons.” Or perhaps she just read the newspapers. For the past few years, the country of Holland has already had euthanasia vans. A Dutch right-to-die organization offers a mobile euthanasia service, with teams traveling around the country to deliver lethal drugs or injections to patients whose own doctors have ethical objections to helping them die. Critics have dubbed them “mobile death squads.”
Once a society accepts a worldview, it tends to work out the logical consequences. The process may proceed quickly or slowly, but because we are rational beings made in God’s image, we tend to live out the implications of our convictions. As we saw in chapter 2, the two-story dualistic worldview was applied first to babies in the womb. The fetus was declared a non-person—expendable, disposable, and fair game for research and experimentation. But today bioethicists have begun to apply the same dehumanizing logic to those already born.
According to personhood theory, human dignity consists in the ability to exercise conscious, deliberate control over our lives (upper story). If a disabled patient loses that mental control due to disease or injury, then personhood itself is lost—even though the patient is still alive and human (lower story).
For example, bioethicist Daniel Callahan says once a patient has lost “the capacity to reason, to have emotions, and to enter into relationships,” they cannot “be called a ‘person’ any longer. . . . It is a mere body only.” At that point, Callahan concludes, the principle of the “sanctity of life” no longer applies.5 You can be unplugged, your treatment withheld, your food and water discontinued, your organs harvested.6
Of course, medical professionals have always had to make difficult practical decisions when treating severely ill patients. The best principle is always to err on the side of life. But it can be a judgment call whether a particular medical procedure is saving life or merely prolonging death. When a patient’s organ systems are all shutting down despite the best medical treatment, then intervention may merely prolong the dying process. In that case, ending invasive and painful forms of medical intervention may allow for more humane care of the patient.
As Hauerwas notes, there is “a distinction between putting to death and letting die.”7
Yet bioethics is not driven only by such practical considerations. It is also driven by worldviews. Peter Singer expresses the dualistic worldview when he insists “that the concept of a person is distinct from that of a member of the species Homo sapiens, and that it is personhood, not species membership, that is most significant in determining when it is wrong to end a life.”8 In other words, being a member of the human species is not enough to qualify as a person with the right to life. You must also meet some additional standard, some level of mental functioning. If you fail to meet that standard, you are just a piece of matter, and your body can be used in experiments, harvested for organs, subject only to a cost-benefit analysis. As bioethicist Tom Beauchamp writes, “Because many humans lack properties of personhood or are less than full persons . . . they might be aggressively used as human research subjects or sources of organs.”9
In our day, it is secular bioethicists like Singer and Beauchamp who influence the doctors who set hospital policy, the legislators who write laws, the judges who rule in court cases, and the healthcare workers who make decisions about our parents and relatives—and eventually about ourselves. That’s why it is critical that we delve more deeply into the personhood theory that lies at the heart of secular bioethics.
Darwinian Path to Death
In chapter 2, we learned that a key turning point in the development of the two-story worldview was Darwin’s theory of evolution. So it is not surprising that many of the leading figures who first called for abortion and euthanasia were supporters of Darwinism. Many of them advocated eugenics, the attempt to improve humanity by eliminating people with disabilities and genetic defects, as well as people deemed to be of “lower” races. In the public mind, eugenics is linked to the Nazis, but in reality it was practiced and promoted throughout much of the Western world even before the rise of Nazism.
In the nineteenth century, German biologist Ernst Haeckel gained fame as an outspoken promoter of Darwin’s theory. In his opinion, modern civilizations that care for the disabled are interfering with the evolutionary principle of survival of the fittest. He urged them to follow “the example of the Spartans and Redskins” who killed disabled infants immediately after birth. He favored euthanasia for disabled adults as well.10
On this side of the Atlantic as well, Darwinism led many prominent thinkers to accept abortion and euthanasia. One historian writes, “The most pivotal turning point in the early history of the euthanasia movement was the coming of Darwinism to America.”11
For example, most people are familiar with Jack London’s famous novels, such as The Call of the Wild. But what they don’t know is that London was an enthusiastic supporter of both euthanasia and eugenics. As a young man, London underwent what one historian calls “a conversion experience”12 to radical materialism by reading the works of Charles Darwin. He memorized long passages from Darwin and could quote them by heart, the way Christians memorize Scripture.
In his short story “The Law of Life,” written in 1901, London portrays an old Eskimo left behind by his nomadic tribe to die in the snow. As the wolves close in to devour him, the old man ponders that, after all, evolution assigns the organism only one task: to reproduce so the species will survive. After that, if the individual dies, “What did it matter after all? Was it not the law of life?”13
The story pounds home the theme that humans have no higher purpose beyond sheer biological survival—that those who have outlived their biological usefulness should be willing to die.14
Margaret Sanger, who founded Planned Parenthood in 1921, was another disciple of Darwin. Modern feminists honor her as an early promoter of birth control, but many do not know that she also promoted death control (euthanasia)—the “one being to bring entrance into life under control of reason, and the other to bring the exit of life under that control.” She wrote, “The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”15
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was one of the most revered Supreme Court justices in American history. Many are surprised to learn that he, too, was an avid Darwinian who supported euthanasia and eugenics. He penned the infamous Buck v. Bell decision (1927) supporting compulsory sterilization laws, which many states had enacted to promote eugenics. In private correspondence he also advocated “putting to death infants that didn’t pass the examination.” Holmes expressed his “contempt” for anyone “not prepared . . . to kill anyone below standard.”16
Another supporter of euthanasia was Clarence Darrow, a trial lawyer best known for arguing in favor of Darwinism in the Scopes trial of 1925. Many people know his name from the famous movie Inherit the Wind. Darrow favored infanticide, urging people to “chloroform unfit children. Show them the same mercy that is shown beasts that are no longer fit to live.”17
Why Christianity Is “Evil”
Why did Darwinism lead so many leading thinkers to support eugenics? Darwin’s theory is often regarded as crucial scientific support for the philosophy of materialism, which reduces humans to material organisms, motivated by physical pain and pleasure. As journalist John Zmirak explains, according to materialism, humans are “merely potential sites for either suffering or pleasure. If we cannot guarantee their pleasure, we at least can end their suffering.”18 Even if the only way to end their suffering is to end their life.
The corollary is that any morality that forbids taking life in such circumstances must be suppressed—especially Christian morality. After all, moral principles are not material. They cannot be seen, heard, weighed, or measured. Consequently, materialist philosophy concludes that morality is not real. It is an illusion—window dressing to disguise what is really nothing but the human organism’s drive to avoid pain and enhance pleasure.
The irony is that, in practice, even committed materialists end up with a form of dualism. To use our two-story metaphor, materialists try to “live” in the lower story, defining reality strictly in terms of material objects knowable by science. But logically, they must decide there is some dividing line that distinguishes those who are sub-personal, who may be killed with impunity, from those who are full persons deserving legal protection. Otherwise they would think it was okay to kill everyone.
Thus even the most rigorous materialists are logically required to operate with an implicit personhood dualism. They are compelled to draw a distinction between the human as a biological organism (lower story) who is expendable and the person (upper story) who has rights and liberties.
An act has an intrinsic logic of its own, and the logic of euthanasia is the two-story division of the human being.
Who Deserves to Live?
The concept of personhood was first explicitly proposed in 1968 by a group of thirteen medical doctors and professors who met at Harvard Medical School. They offered what came to be called “the Harvard criteria” for establishing when a patient has died. In the process, says science journalist Dick Teresi, “the Harvard criteria switched the debate from biology to philosophy. You are dead not when your heart cannot be restarted, you can no longer breathe, or your cells die, but when you suffer a ‘loss of personhood.’”19
The problem is that the concept of personhood is not based on any objective reality. Most people think brain death is established by an EEG. Not so. Back in 1971, it was discovered that some patients diagnosed as brain dead still had brain waves, so the requirement of an EEG was eliminated. The measures that doctors now use to determine death vary widely.20 As we saw in chapter 1, some doctors like Ronald Cranford have argued that even patients who are conscious—who can answer questions and scoot around the hospital in an electric wheelchair—are not “persons” and should have their food and water discontinued.
Teresi concludes that death has become “a social construct. We write people off as dead when it is convenient to do so. . . . Doctors are not making medical judgments but rather moral judgments about who deserves to live or die.”21
Essentially a patient is no longer a person when the attending physician says so.
When Death Is Cheaper
Polls reveal that many ordinary people are accepting personhood theory, even if they are not familiar with the term. That is, they are accepting the idea that the value of their lives depends on their ability to exercise autonomy and control. Advocates for assisted suicide typically use scare tactics that tap into our fear of intense pain. But in jurisdictions that have legalized assisted suicide, surprisingly, most people who choose to die are not experiencing pain or suffering. One study found they are most afraid of the “impending loss of self, abilities, and quality of life”—and when that happens, “they fear being a burden to others.”22
Similarly, another study found that the majority of those who seek out a doctor to give them a lethal prescription fear losing control. They check off reasons like “losing autonomy” (91 percent) and “less able to engage in activities” (89 percent). Only a minority check off reasons we might normally expect, such as debilitating pain (24 percent) or worry about the cost of medical treatment (3 percent).23
These polls show that secular society has successfully drilled into people’s minds the idea that when we lose control and autonomy, our lives lose their value.
In 2015, a seventy-five-year-old woman named Gill Pharaoh ended her life in an assisted suicide clinic, abandoning her children and a life partner who loved her. Her reason? “I do not think old age is fun.” The woman suffered no serious health issues. She even stated, “I am enjoying my life.” But she worried that at some later time, she might deteriorate to a “stage when I may be requiring a lot of help.”24
It is outrageous that people today are terrified of one day requiring “help.” We must stand by people struggling with their fears and let them know that even when they become less independent and productive, they are worthwhile persons deserving of care and respect. A student of mine named Alison Delong, who works for a suicide hotline, told me, “I spend hours every week persuading people not to end their lives, telling them that their lives still have value. It breaks my heart that people think they must be able to function in a certain way to be considered significant.”
In the future, the decision may be taken out of our hands. In states where assisted suicide (also called voluntary euthanasia) is legal, some patients report being pressured to end their lives to avoid costly medical treatment. In Oregon, there have been several reports of cancer patients being pushed toward assisted suicide because it is cheaper than the medical treatment they need. Cancer drugs can cost anywhere from $3,000 to $6,000 a month, while the cost of lethal medication is about $35 to $50.25
It doesn’t take a genius to see that the easiest way to reduce healthcare costs is physician-assisted suicide. When human life is no longer seen to have inherent value, it will be subject to purely utilitarian calculation of costs and benefits.
Voluntary euthanasia may not remain voluntary.
It is a tragedy to see the medical profession move from suicide prevention to suicide facilitation. The right-to-die movement presents euthanasia as compassionate. But disparaging human life as expendable is not compassionate. The term compassion literally means to “suffer with” (com = with, passion = suffer). True compassion means being willing to suffer on behalf of others, loving them enough to bear the burden of caring for them.
If Humans Are Machines, Why Not Pull the Plug?
What about involuntary euthanasia, when individuals are not capable of giving informed consent? If they are not lucid enough to make decisions for themselves, that in itself is taken to mean that they are no longer persons. Peter Singer insists that the severely mentally incapacitated are candidates for euthanasia because they “were once persons” but no longer. “Their lives have no intrinsic value. . . . They are biologically alive, but not biographically.”26
Joseph Fletcher even manages to turn an ethic of life into a form of cruelty: “To prolong life uselessly, while the personal qualities of freedom, knowledge, self-possession and control, and responsibility are sacrificed, is to attack the moral status of a person.”27
The arts are addressing the issue as well. An opera by minimalist composer Steve Reich explores various threats to human life, with a libretto that juxtaposes recordings from scientists. The well-known atheist Richard Dawkins is heard saying that humans “are machines created by our genes.” Immediately biologist Robert Pollack draws the logical conclusion: “I have no sense of guilt pulling the plug on any machine.”28
If humans are reduced to machines, why should anyone object to pulling the plug?
These are not merely abstract moral issues to debate. I am often invited to lecture on the topics in this book, and when I get to euthanasia almost invariably someone in the room starts weeping. Talking to them afterward, I learn that they have gone through the experience of making a difficult life-and-death decision about a father or mother or grandparent.
During one lecture, I noticed that a stately older black woman had tears in her eyes. Introducing herself as Evelyn, she explained that her father had been in the hospital for heart problems but was not dying. Nevertheless, the doctors decided his time had come. Unfortunately, Evelyn was out of town, and the doctors persuaded the rest of the family to say yes to a lethal injection. In urgent phone calls, Evelyn begged them not to decide until she could get back home, but she was too late. By the time she got off the plane, her father’s life had been ended.
The only reliable support for human rights is the conviction enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” even if they are disabled or elderly. A biblical worldview says a disabled person is just that—a disabled person. Its view of the human being is wholistic and incarnational, treating the body as the embodiment of the person. As Meilander puts it, in bioethics we must constantly remind ourselves that in dealing with the human body, we are dealing with “the place where we come to know a person.”29
Euthanasia advocates are essentially saying that our personhood consists solely in the higher mental functions. The implication is that our bodies are not part of our identity as persons. But the idea of personhood based on cerebral function is very fragile. My personhood might end the moment my cortex starts to malfunction. By contrast, the biblical view is much more resilient and enduring. “In Christian thinking,” writes physician John Wyatt, “whatever happens to you in the future, whatever disease or accident may befall your central nervous system, even if you are struck down by dementia or enter a persistent vegetative state, you will still be you: a unique and wonderful person known and loved by God.”30 The pressure is off to prove our worth or persuade people that our lives have value.
At the end of time, with the redemption of the body, we will finally recognize the beauty and grandeur in each human being. We can start even now to train ourselves to see people within that eschatological perspective. In the words of theologian David Hart, we can learn to recognize that there is “a glory hidden in the depths of every person, even the least of us—even ‘defectives’ and ‘morons’ and ‘genetic inferiors,’ if you will—waiting to be revealed, a beauty and dignity and power of such magnificence and splendor that, could we see it now, it would move us either to worship or to terror.”31
Don’t Impose Your Views
Liberals often say, “If you’re against abortion, don’t have one. If you’re against assisted suicide, don’t do it. But don’t impose your views on others.” At first, that might sound fair. But what progressives fail to understand is that every social practice rests on certain assumptions of what the world is like—a worldview. When a society accepts the practice, it absorbs the worldview that justifies it.
That’s why issues like abortion and euthanasia are not matters of purely private individuals making personal choices. They involve deciding which worldview will shape our communal life.
We grasp the connection more clearly when considering other issues: “Don’t like murder? Then don’t kill anyone. Don’t like slavery? Then don’t own slaves. But don’t tell me I don’t have that choice.” No one makes those arguments. We understand that granting private individuals the right to murder and enslave people inescapably implies a worldview—one that says some people’s lives are expendable, not worthy of legal protection.
In the same way, accepting abortion or euthanasia inescapably implies personhood theory—one that says some people’s lives are expendable, not worthy of legal protection. And when that worldview is absorbed, it has life-and-death consequences ultimately for everyone. Any cutoff point becomes arbitrary. The dehumanizing effects put all of us at risk. When Christians argue for the truth of the biblical worldview, they are seeking to protect human rights and dignity for everyone.
Harvesting Humans
To get a clearer sense of the central role played by the two-story dichotomy in secular ethics, let’s run through several additional issues that appear regularly in news headlines, starting with research on human embryos. In two-story thinking, human embryos are merely biological entities, not persons. Therefore they may be destroyed without moral significance, if a utilitarian calculation suggests some practical benefit to society. Many people have come to accept the idea that in the search for new medical cures, human embryos may be sown, harvested, patented, and sold—as though they were just another natural resource.
If we reject the two-story dualism, however, then personhood is inextricably linked to being biologically human at every stage of development. Destroying an embryo is morally akin to killing an adult. All the arguments in chapter 2 against abortion apply equally to destroying embryos in the lab.
Even more problematic, embryo research typically involves creating human life with the direct intention of destroying it. Even those who are uncertain whether the embryo is fully a person often find this troubling. A fundamental principle of ethics is that people should be treated as intrinsically valuable, not valuable only as a means to some extrinsic end. Or as we say in ordinary conversation, it is wrong to use people.
For example, columnist Charles Krauthammer writes, “I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred upon conception. But I also do not believe that a human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserves no more respect than an appendix.” So where do we draw the line? Krauthammer suggests that we draw a “bright line prohibiting the deliberate creation of human embryos solely for the instrumental purpose of research—a clear violation of the categorical imperative not to make a human life (even if only a potential human life) a means rather than an end.”32
Wesley Smith puts the objection more succinctly: There is something deeply dehumanizing about “treating human life—no matter how nascent—as a mere natural resource to be harvested like a soy bean crop.”33
Even our language reflects a shift in worldview. Ancient Israel, stressing the transmission of life from father to child, used a verb translated as “to beget.” The Christian world, impressed with primacy of the Creator in the generation of life, used the verb “to procreate.” And moderns? We use the language of the machine and the factory—“to reproduce.” When we move the process to the laboratory and talk about “reproductive technologies,” the emphasis is on treating life as a product that we are free to master and reshape. And those who make human beings in vitro feel entitled to unmake them—to treat them as products of technology, objects at our disposal. Life is being reduced to a marketable commodity.34
The irony is that embryonic stem cell research is not even necessary. Adult stem cell research often produces better outcomes. For example, a 2016 Washington Post article describes a study that stunned researchers. They injected adult stem cells, harvested from bone marrow, into the brains of stroke patients. “Their recovery was not just a minimal recovery like someone who couldn’t move a thumb now being able to wiggle it. It was much more meaningful. One 71-year-old wheelchair-bound patient was walking again,” said Gary Steinberg, chair of neurosurgery at Stanford. The study’s positive outcome challenges “a core belief about brain damage—that it is permanent and irreversible.”35 Using adult stem cells avoids the ethical issues involved with destroying embryos while producing better results.36
What about harvesting aborted babies for their body parts? Once we have dehumanized fetuses as objects, it is natural to ask: Why not get some benefit from them, just as we recycle plastic bags and glass bottles to gain benefit from other waste products? Comedian Sarah Silverman has argued that since “abortion is legal” in America, “it would be insane not to use fetal tissue for science and education.” (Critics responded that since gas chambers were legal in Nazi Germany, it would have been insane not to use human skin for lamp shades.)37
Once the idea of human strip-mining is accepted, the next step is the outright sale of fetal organs. Bioethicist Jacob Appel argues, “If a woman has the fundamental right to terminate a pregnancy, why not the right to use the products of that terminated pregnancy as she sees fit?” Why not allow her to gain some economic benefit? “Many women would likely use the proceeds of such sales to finance college educations or to help raise their children.”
Appel ends by predicting, “Someday, if we are fortunate, scientific research may make possible farms of artificial ‘wombs’ breeding fetuses for their organs.”38
It is worth reminding ourselves why our law does not allow the sale of human beings or human body parts. “There are, in a civilized society, some things that money cannot buy,” wrote the New Jersey Supreme Court in 1988. “There are . . . values that society deems more important than granting to wealth whatever it can buy, be it labor, love, or life.”39 The New Jersey case involved surrogate motherhood, and the court ruled that it is a form of baby selling, hence illegal. The sale of children is morally problematic in the same way that slavery is problematic: Human beings are not objects that should ever be for sale.
There is also the problem of the status of the surrogate mothers, who are reduced to rent-a-wombs. “The accelerating boom in surrogacy for gay couples . . . represents a disturbing slide into the brutal exploitation of women who usually come from the developing world and are often bullied or pimped into selling their wombs to satisfy the selfish whims of wealthy gay or lesbian westerners,” writes journalist Julie Bindel, who herself identifies as a lesbian. “This cruelty is accompanied by epic hypocrisy. People from Europe and the USA who would shudder at the idea of involvement in human or sex trafficking have ended up indulging in a grotesque form of ‘reproductive trafficking.’”40
A member of the European Parliament says surrogacy “reduces the woman to a reproductive machine and the child to an asset in a business transaction.”41
The ethical principle here is that some things should be immune from commercial transactions—that some social spheres lie outside the range of the market. The most fundamental is the right of the human being not to be bought and sold. In the words of Christian ethicist Scott Rae, the reason we do not allow the sale of human beings “is that there are things that are so close to one’s personhood and individual self-fulfillment that they cannot be objects of barter without denigrating personhood.”
The underlying problem, Rae explains, is that “when a monetary price is put on a human being or an attribute of personhood, this creates an alienation by separating the person from the thing that has been commodified.”42 Whatever is monetizable—including the body—is thereby treated as alienable from the self instead of integral to the self.
The heart of the issue is a dualism that alienates the body from the self.
Transhumanism: Creating Supermen
A relatively new movement that adopts the two-story secular ethic is transhumanism. The logic goes like this: Since humans are nothing special, why not use technology to create a new stage of life beyond humanity? Transhumanists say it’s time to take charge of evolution through genetic engineering. They argue that human life as it exists today is merely one step in an endless evolutionary chain, a chance configuration of cells that will be surpassed in the next stage of evolution. Waxing poetic, philosopher John Gray writes that humans are “only currents in the drift of genes.”43
Transhumanism zealously promotes the vision of a bioengineered utopia in which we will be liberated from our human limitations. It promises that we are moving toward a “post-human” future, when wealthy parents will be able to afford genetic improvements so extensive that they will literally create a new race.
The human body has been reduced to a mechanism on the level of gizmos and gadgets, which clears the decks for unbridled experimentation with genes and DNA.
But wait a moment: Isn’t this eugenics? And didn’t we witness the tragic results of eugenics under the Nazis? To avoid any unsavory association with Nazism, transhumanists stress that the new eugenics will be consumer based. Parents will be empowered by technology to choose their offspring’s genetic traits. Choice, the key tenet of modern liberalism, magically makes everything morally acceptable.
In reality, however, the new eugenics will be as dangerous to liberty as the old eugenics was. Nick Bostrom, a leading transhumanist at Oxford, says human nature is “a work-in-progress, a half-baked beginning that we can learn to remold in desirable ways.”44 But who will have the power to decide which ways are desirable? Is it reasonable to expect power of that magnitude to remain in the hands of parents? Hardly.
If it becomes possible to remold human nature itself, in reality that will lead to the worst forms of tyranny.
One of the most prominent advocates of transhumanism is geneticist Lee Silver of Princeton University. In Remaking Eden: Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World, Silver spins out a scenario in which humanity will bifurcate into two separate races—genetic übermenschen (super-persons) who rule over untermenschen (sub-persons). The first group will become the controllers of society. The second group will become the low-paid laborers and service-providers.45
Silver is clearly inspired by Nietzsche’s concept of the übermensch as the next stage in evolution. Though he projects this bioengineered society as a utopia, it is far more likely to become a coercive dystopia. Once we deny that humans have unique dignity just for being human, we have opened the door to tyranny. As philosopher Mortimer Adler warns, “Groups of superior men [will] be able to justify their enslavement, exploitation, or even genocide of inferior human groups, on factual and moral grounds akin to those that we now rely on to justify our treatment of the animals we harness as beasts of burden.”46
The Cartesian dualism of the mind as a separate entity controlling the body will be worked out socially as a class of mental workers controlling a class of manual laborers.
This prediction calls to mind the plotline of countless dystopian novels and movies. C. S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, sums up the problem in one of his most unforgettable lines: “What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”47
Finally, there are transhumanists who hope to transcend the body altogether. Ray Kurzweil, Google’s director of engineering, hopes that advances in artificial intelligence will enable us to download the brain to a computer, making possible a kind of digital immortality. “The whole idea of a ‘species’ is a biological concept,” he says. “What we are doing is transcending biology.”48
A similar anti-body ideology animates the work of influential futurist Martine Rothblatt, who is a female transgender (born male). Rothblatt’s book Virtually Human proposes that a digital database of your life and personality can be used to create a “mindclone,” a kind of digital consciousness that will survive the death of your body. Do you prefer a flesh-and-blood body? Then in Rothblatt’s view, you are guilty of “fleshism.”49
And people say Christianity is anti-body!
In a culture that demeans and disparages the flesh-and-blood body, the Bible’s high view of the material world is one reason it is “good news.” The message of Christianity does not start with salvation but with creation. What God created has intrinsic value and worth.
The Biological Book of Life
If humans are just a chance collection of cells, as personhood theory claims, why not mix in cells from other species, creating human-animal hybrids? Transhumanists argue there is no ethical barrier to splicing animal DNA into human DNA. These transgenic technologies (transgenic means “across species”) are being proposed as a means to enhance human capabilities and create a post-human race.
The same technologies could also be used to enhance animals’ capabilities. Futurist James Hughes advocates what he calls “uplifting” chimpanzees genetically to give them human intellectual capacities—not because that would be good for chimps but because it would prove that they deserve the legal status of persons. Hughes says, “Persons don’t have to be human, and not all humans are persons”50—which reveals how undefined and open-ended the secular concept of personhood has become.
Using a literary metaphor, biologist Thomas Eisner says a species is not “a hard-bound volume of the library of nature” but instead “a loose-leaf book, whose individual pages, the genes, might be available for selective transfer and modification of other species.”51
This is a highly revealing metaphor. It suggests that if there is no author of the book of life, then there is no basis for regarding organisms as integrated wholes. When an author tells a story, all the segments are held together by a unifying theme. But if life is an accident produced by blind, material forces, organisms can be treated as random collections of genes and other spare parts to be mixed and matched at will. If there is nothing special about humans, why not splice together animal and human genes to create a post-human race?
The assumption that drives all these futurist scenarios, explains embryologist Brian Goodwin, is the Darwinian claim that there is no such thing as species. Most people do not realize that, technically, Darwinism denies that species are real. The theory proposes that evolution proceeds through minor changes in an ever-continuous chain of individuals. What appear to be species are merely temporary groupings in the ever-shifting populations of evolving organisms, eddies in the genetic stream. (It is ironic that Darwin’s major work is called On the Origin of Species when in fact he denied the reality of species.)
What are the implications? Because of the assumption that there are no species, explains Goodwin, “we’ve lost even the concept of human nature.” No special status is assigned to being human—because there is no human species. As a result, “life becomes a set of parts, commodities that can be shifted around” to suit some geneticists’ vision of progress.52 The floodgates have been flung open for unfettered refashioning of human nature itself.
As former pope John Paul II writes, for secularists there is no “truth of creation which must be acknowledged, or a plan of God for life which must be respected.” As a result, “everything is negotiable, everything is open to bargaining.”53 Humanity itself is up for grabs.
When the plan of God is respected, genetic research can be a tool for great good. Within a Christian worldview, genetic research can be pursued with the same motives we pursue other forms of scientific research. Science is a means of fulfilling the cultural mandate given to our first parents to “subdue the earth” by discovering nature’s laws and developing its potential. We have freedom to be creative and inventive as long as we do not violate human dignity. Many historians say it was Christianity that sparked the scientific revolution in the first place. For example, science required the conviction that nature has a rational order because it was created by a rational Mind.54
Science can also be a means of overcoming the effects of the fall, repairing its brokenness and recovering our original condition. Genetic medicine, like other forms of medicine, aims at alleviating the suffering caused by the fall and recovering the whole and healthy life that God originally intended when he created the human race.55
Bloodsuckers, Vampires, and Cockroaches
Transhumanists often speak in euphoric tones, as though a technology-created utopia is just around the corner. We are on “the cusp of a new enlightenment,” enthuses Adrian Woolfson of Cambridge University. We can finally “entertain the possibility of modifying our own nature and creating artificial life.”56 But this utopian vision is an illusion. What counts most in producing a truly humane society is not the level of technology but the prevailing worldview. And a worldview that says human life has no inherent value or dignity will never lead to utopia, no matter how advanced the tools and technology.
Philosopher Luc Ferry—surprisingly, in a book promoting atheism—says it was Christianity that introduced the concept of equal rights. It overthrew ancient social hierarchies between rich and poor, master and slave. “According to Christianity, we were all ‘brothers,’ on the same level as creatures of God,” Ferry writes. “Christianity is the first universalist ethos.”57
Another atheist, Richard Rorty, agrees. In a lecture to UNESCO, he noted that throughout history, societies have come up with various ways to exclude certain groups from the human family. Those who belonged to a different tribe, clan, race, or religion were labeled subhuman. By contrast, Rorty notes, Christianity gave rise to the concept of universal rights, derived from the conviction “that all human beings are created in the image of God.”
In the modern age, however, Rorty says, due to Darwin we no longer accept the idea of creation. Therefore we are no longer morally bound to maintain that everyone who is biologically human has equal dignity.58
The implication is clear: Once a culture abandons the conviction that all humans are created in God’s image, human rights are up for grabs. Any category of humans is fair game to be excluded or even eliminated. That’s why the stakes in this debate are so high. As Wesley Smith writes, “If human life does not matter simply and merely because it is human, this means that moral worth becomes subjective and a matter of who has the power to decide.” And we already know what happens then: “History shows that once we create categories of differing worth, those humans denigrated by the political power structure as having less value are exploited, oppressed, and killed.”59
The history of chattel slavery in America and the totalitarian systems of the twentieth century give stark evidence of the morally horrific consequences of treating humans as mere things. The slaveholders argued that Africans were less than fully human, then sold, whipped, hunted, raped, and killed them. Nazi propaganda dehumanized Jews, calling them “rats” and “the vermin of mankind,” then murdered six million of them. In the Red Terror, Lenin called whole categories of people “former persons,” or more colorfully “bloodsuckers,” “vampires,” “parasites,” and “class enemies.” That made it easier to ship them off to concentration camps or simply shoot them. In the 1994 Rwandan massacre, the Hutus were incited to violence by government radio addresses calling the Tutsis “cockroaches” that must be “exterminated.”
In addition to the testimony of history, the impact of personhood theory has been tested experimentally. In an ingenious sociological study, John H. Evans measured the moral views of Christians against those who accept personhood theory. The experiment found that personhood theory is indeed associated with lower support for human rights. Members of the public who agree with personhood theory are more supportive of buying organs from poor people, of experimenting on prisoners against their will, of torturing people to potentially save lives—and are less willing to sacrifice to stop genocide.60
We tend to work out the logic of our basic convictions. Because of Darwin, many people no longer have a moral basis for universal human rights. We should expect to see the logical consequences played out in the denial of human rights to those deemed to be non-persons.
Animal Rights and Wrongs
People often ask me if the concept of animal rights contradicts personhood theory. Doesn’t it express respect for biological, organic life? Not at all. Arguments for animal rights are just another example of weighing the value of life by instrumental measures, such as cognitive ability, instead of intrinsic value.
Animal rights activists say they want to elevate animal rights to the same level as human rights, and no doubt they are sincere. But what is the logic of their argument? How do they support giving rights to animals? By arguing that certain animals—such as pigs, dogs, chimps, dolphins—have higher cognitive abilities than some humans. Therefore, those animals qualify as persons, while “inferior” humans do not.
By this reasoning, not all people are persons, but some animals are persons. Peter Singer states that a newborn baby is not a person but the more intelligent animals are: “The life of a newborn baby is of less value to it than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee is to the nonhuman animal.”61 He recommends using humans in medical experiments instead of animals, if the animals have higher cognitive capacities.
Thus the value of any living thing is measured by its mental function. The animal rights movement does not contradict personhood theory. It relies on it.
Genuine respect for animals and the rest of nature does not rest on an ideology that disparages biology in favor of mental skills. It derives from the conviction that all creation comes from the hand of God and therefore has intrinsic dignity and value. Scripture teaches that humans are stewards of creation, responsible to a higher authority for the way we care for the world around us (Gen. 1:28). Proverbs 12:10 says, “The righteous care for the needs of their animals.” Humanity is not the highest rung of an evolutionary ladder, free to use nature any way we want for our own benefit. Instead we will answer to the Creator for the way we treat his creation.
The public still largely takes for granted that infanticide and euthanasia are morally wrong, but they have forgotten where that idea came from. Historian O. M. Bakke argues that it was Christianity that made these moral views nearly universal in the West.
In his book When Children Became People, Bakke explains that in ancient Greece and Rome, children were considered non-persons. Ancient society was organized in what we can visualize as concentric circles: At the center was the freeborn, adult male. They had the most value. Other people were valued depending on how similar they were to that model: women, foreigners, slaves, and children. Literature from the classical world describes children in tones of contempt, using adjectives like weak, fearful, and irrational.
This demeaning of children had concrete consequences. Not surprisingly, it led to a cold and callous view of children. Abortion was widespread. Unwanted children were abandoned or exposed, left outside to die of hunger or to be devoured by wild animals. Children were treated roughly; it was considered normal to beat them. In Rome, fathers even had the legal right to kill their children for any reason.
A negative view of children also contributed to a low view of women. The very fact that women were more involved in childrearing and more likely to develop emotional attachments to children was taken as a sign of weakness and vulgarity on their part. Bakke sums up: “Children and slaves were the father’s property, just material objects. To a very large extent, he could treat his wife, his children, and other household members as he pleased, without any fear of legal consequences.”62
That included the legal right to sexually abuse their slaves—both male and female, adult and children. Brothels specializing in sex slaves, including children, were legal and thriving businesses. Abandoned babies were often rescued then forced into sexual slavery. Romans who owned young slaves even hired them out to brothels.63
Today we often hear it said that the ancient world was more “tolerant” in sexual matters, but tolerance had nothing to do with it. It was an expression of social status: Most sexual acts were considered permissible as long as they involved a person of higher status dominating a person of lower status. In the ancient world, explains philosopher Martha Nussbaum,
The gender of the object . . . is not in itself morally problematic. Boys and women are very often treated interchangeably as objects of [male] desire. What is socially important is to penetrate rather than to be penetrated. Sex is understood fundamentally not as interaction, but as a doing of some thing to someone; and the passive recipient is marked by that fact as of lower social status.64
This is the culture in which the Christian church was born. This is the culture in which Jesus shocked his contemporaries by treating children not as contemptible but as valuable: “See that you do not look down on one of these little ones. . . . Whoever welcomes one child like this in my name welcomes me” (Matt. 18:10, 5 HCSB). Jesus even held up children as a positive paradigm for adults to emulate: “Unless you are converted and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (v. 3). “Let the little children come to me . . . for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these” (19:14). No one before had set up children as a positive model for adults. The church fathers wrote extensively on Jesus’s words, puzzling over what they meant in a culture where a high view of children was a complete novelty.
Eventually, as Christians gained political influence in the Roman empire, they succeeded in getting laws passed outlawing infanticide (in AD 374). They also passed laws granting government aid to poor families who did not have the means to raise their children, so they would not be tempted to abandon or expose them. Yet the custom of exposure was not ended just by passing laws. It continued to be practiced until the clergy finally persuaded parents to give up their babies at the door of the church instead, which gave rise to the first orphanages.
Jesus’s Appalling Scandal
Modern Christians need to recover an appreciation of the uniqueness of the Christian worldview. Since we were toddlers in Sunday school, we have sung “Jesus Loves the Little Children.” We no longer realize how radical Christianity was when it first taught the value of children.
Ultimately it was Jesus’s own life and death that destroyed the underlying notion that the value of life depends on social status. After all, the God who made heaven and earth humbled himself to become a child. He lived a life of poverty and weakness, then submitted to death, even death on a cross. We are used to seeing the cross surrounded by flowers and stained glass windows, or worn as a shiny piece of jewelry. Most of us no longer realize that in ancient Rome, crucifixion was considered a barbaric form of execution reserved for the lowest, most reviled criminals—mostly slaves and political rebels. It was the ultimate form of shame and humiliation, something not even to be mentioned in polite company. The execution of Jesus was therefore considered an appalling scandal.
And by submitting to such hideous humiliation, he utterly destroyed differences in social status. Christians began to proclaim the radical message that basic human rights do not depend on status or power or stage of life. At the foot of the cross, the poor, the slave, the oppressed, the young, and the weak are all equal to the rich and powerful. Christians are forbidden to show favoritism (James 2:1–9; 5:1–6).
Right from the start, then, the early Christians viewed children as complete and valuable human beings. One result, says Bakke, was that Christian parents practiced a much “greater involvement in upbringing than was generally the case in pagan families.”65 In contrast to wealthy Romans, who often turned the care of their children over to servants and nurses, the church fathers urged parents to raise their own children. In the fourth century, John Chrysostom wrote, “Let everything take second place to care for our children, our bringing them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.”66 After all, what is at stake is a human being’s eternal destiny.
In all these ways, Christianity invented a novel concept of childhood, a new mindset that regarded children as persons to be valued, cherished, and cared for.
The practices of a pre-Christian society signal the direction that our post-Christian society is likely to take. As the world rejects the biblical ethic, it loses not only the basis for human rights generally, as we saw earlier, but also the basis for the humane care of children. Social critics note that practices like contraception, abortion, and artificial reproduction are already creating an attitude that having a child is merely a lifestyle choice, an accessory to enrich adult lives and meet adult needs. Take away a Christian view of childhood, and there is no guarantee that our society will continue to offer special protections to children.
Hate Thy Neighbor
We live in a time of propaganda and sales pitches, where words are used to manipulate. For example, a Gallup poll shows a 20 percent increase in support for assisted suicide if it is described using euphemisms. A full 70 percent of Americans are in favor of allowing doctors to hasten a terminally ill patient’s death when it is described as allowing doctors to “end the patient’s life by some painless means.” But only 51 percent support euthanasia when it is described as doctors helping a patient “commit suicide.”67 Clearly, there is still moral opposition to suicide.
What this means is that social evils like infanticide, euthanasia, and assisted suicide will likely become enshrined in the law in a manner very different from history’s previous great evils, such as slavery or the Holocaust. These practices will most likely be imposed in the name of reducing suffering and enhancing choice, under the heading of bioethics.
They may even come with a Christian veneer. A few years ago, Anne Lamott, a favorite writer among Christian young adults, helped a man kill himself. “The man I killed did not want to die, but he no longer felt he had much of a choice,” Lamott writes in the Los Angeles Times. With his body wasting away from cancer and his mind beginning to waver, the man was open to Lamott’s offer to acquire the lethal drugs needed to commit suicide.
The friend “was sort of surprised that as a Christian I so staunchly agreed with him about assisted suicide,” Lamott notes. To justify her stance, she does not reflect deeply on the data of Scripture or the history of Christian moral thought. In fact, she does not reflect on those things at all. Instead she compares life to a school, assuring her friend that it’s okay to drop out early and get an Incomplete.68 Though in her writings Lamott positions herself as a Christian, she essentially jettisons scriptural principles regarding life as a gift from God. There is nothing distinctively Christian in her essay, even though it deals with an issue as serious as ending a person’s life.
Lamott shows no interest in Scripture on the issue of abortion either. In an earlier Los Angeles Times piece, she describes a conference where she unleashed an angry tirade against the pro-life position. “As a Christian and a feminist,” she writes, she felt compelled to speak out for “women whose lives had been righted and redeemed by Roe v. Wade.”69
“Righted and redeemed” by abortion? This is putting a veneer of biblical language over a secular ethic. It illustrates how even those who identify as Christian can get taken in by a secular worldview. Too often, they fail to recognize it because they know Christianity only as a spiritual experience, not as an alternative worldview. They do not realize that the Bible provides not only a message of salvation but also a lens through which we view all of life—the human person, history, nature, and society.
To be strategically effective in protecting human dignity, we need to get beyond the slogans and placards, helping others recognize the secular worldviews that shape people’s thinking. We must stand against those who enable death and despair, while making a positive case for “loving thy neighbor.”
A Body of Broken Bones
One reason issues like euthanasia are so salient today is that people no longer have positive ways to respond to suffering. The biblical answer to the problem of suffering and death is that they were not part of God’s original plan. Evil entered into creation at a particular time in history—which caused a cataclysmic change, distorting and disfiguring the original creation. That’s why evil is so hateful, repulsive, and tragic. When we recoil from sickness and death, our response is entirely appropriate. It’s important to remember that God is on our side. He did not create evil. And he hates it even more than we do.
But Christianity also teaches that, amazingly, God himself entered into the human condition and experienced suffering and death by execution on a Roman cross. In doing so, God inverted death into a means of achieving new life. “By his wounds we are healed” (Isa. 53:5).
As a result, God can use difficult and painful events in a redemptive way to deepen our character and reconcile our relationships. My favorite analogy is a broken bone that has healed wrong. The surgeon has to break the bone again, which is painful, to get it to grow straight and strong. Spiritually speaking, we are full of broken bones. Our character is wounded by sinful patterns that have hardened. That’s why it often takes crises and difficulties to “break” our destructive life patterns, so we can grow straight and strong.70
Though evil is still evil, the wonder is that God is greater and can turn it to good.
Even secular psychologists note that suffering can be transformative, and they have coined a term for it: “post-traumatic growth.” An article in Psychology Today reports that many people who have suffered traumatic life-events such as bereavement, divorce, serious illness, job loss, or combat actually grew through the experience: “They became more compassionate for the sufferings of others . . . so that they had deeper and more satisfying relationships. One of the most common changes was that they developed a more philosophical or spiritual attitude to life.”71
That is, the crisis spurred a spiritual search. Psychologist Judith Neal studied forty people who went through post-traumatic growth, and describes the process in these words:
Initially, most of them experienced a “dark night of the soul,” where their previous values were thrown into question, and life ceased to have any meaning. After this, they went through a phase of spiritual searching, trying to make sense of what had happened to them, and find new values. And finally, once they had found new spiritual principles to live by, they entered a phase of “spiritual integration,” when they applied these new principles. At this point they found new meaning and purpose in life, together with a gratitude for being alive, and even for having been through so much turmoil.72
Most amazing is that last phrase: They came to be thankful even for the turmoil itself because it was the spur to inner growth. The conclusion is that we should not assume a person is a candidate for euthanasia just because they are suffering.
Of course, there is nothing automatic about such a positive outcome. Suffering can deepen us but it can also make us angry, bitter, and resentful. The key is whether we respond by turning to God in our suffering. Then it becomes possible to follow in the path of Jesus, who “learned obedience from what he suffered” (Heb. 5:8).
Ella: Wheelchair Hero
Sometimes the best argument against practices like assisted suicide is a striking example. Ella Frech is a spunky, homeschooled eleven-year-old who is currently the number-two ranked professional female wheelchair skater (WCMX) in the world. She regularly practices drop-ins, wheelies, and ride-the-rail at the skate park. (Did you even know that people can use wheelchairs like skateboards, performing hair-raising tricks?)
Ella wrote an article protesting the movie Me Before You, which is about a young man in a wheelchair who commits assisted suicide. She subtitled her article, “Dear Hollywood, Why Do You Want Me Dead?”
“Please don’t deny it,” she starts out. “The movies you make tell me the truth about what you really think about me.” She references an earlier pro-euthanasia film, Million Dollar Baby, then continues:
“Me Before You” [is] the story of a guy who gets in an accident, and has a spinal cord injury, and has to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. A guy you think should want to die because he has to live a life that looks like mine.
Well, what’s wrong with a life that looks like mine?73
Hollywood is promoting a worldview that says if your body is not perfect, you should stop being a burden to yourself and society and just kill yourself, Ella writes. She concludes,
You may not believe in God. . . . But I do, and because of that I believe in the value of all people. I believe we are all made in His image and likeness. That’s why I believe all people are worth something. If you believe that people only get their value from each other, then people can take that away. But if our value comes from God, then nobody has the right to say someone who walks is worth more than someone who doesn’t.74
Most people do not realize that the disability rights movement is almost unified in opposing assisted suicide—precisely because disabled people know they are the prime targets of the death movement.
Ghost Boy: “I Hated Barney”
For another inspiring example, meet a man who spent twelve years trapped inside his body, with no way of communicating with the outside world. After suffering an illness at age twelve, Martin Pistorius fell into a coma. When he regained consciousness a few years later, he was unable to speak or move his limbs. Everyone thought he was still a vegetable. This nightmarish condition is known as total locked-in syndrome. Doctors said Martin should just be kept comfortable until he died. Every day his parents dropped him off at a day care, where the staff parked him in front of a television for hours to watch reruns of children’s cartoons.
“I cannot even express to you how much I hated Barney,” Martin says today, referring to a children’s TV show featuring a purple dinosaur, which he was forced to watch day in and day out. Worse, he was abused mentally, physically, and even sexually by various caregivers. Without a voice, he could not tell anyone about it. He even overheard his mother say, in a moment of extreme frustration, “I wish you would die.”
But Martin’s father never gave up. Daily he washed and fed Martin, dressed him, and took him to the care center. His father’s persistence finally paid off. When Martin was twenty-five, an empathetic therapist noticed that he was able to make nearly imperceptible smiles and nods. She persuaded his parents to have him tested. To everyone’s shock, his brain was fully functioning. In the following years, he learned to use a computer to communicate, taught himself to read and write, graduated from college, trained as a web designer, and got married.
In his book Ghost Boy, Martin says that all along he had a strong sense of God’s presence. Because his family never attended church, he knew nothing of Christian doctrine. “I had no idea why I felt His presence so strongly. . . .Yet somehow I instinctively knew that He was with me. . . . My faith didn’t waver. He was as present to me as air, as constant as breathing.”75 When Martin met the beautiful Christian woman who would later become his wife, he finally learned about the God whose presence he had sensed all his life.
Making the Womb a “Safe Place”
Of course, the majority of brain-damaged people do not wake up. But a 1996 study found that close to half—43 percent—of patients thought to be in persistent vegetative states had been misdiagnosed.76 The difficulty with making life-and-death decisions is that human knowledge is never completely certain. (The Hebrews knew that people sometimes revive after they appear to be dead, so their tradition was to wait three days after death to make sure the person was dead—which may explain why Jesus was in the tomb for three days.)77
Even in cases when the outcome is more predictable, how should we respond—by ending life or by loving life as long as God gives it?
Joseph and Janelle Banks learned through an ultrasound that their twins were conjoined (they shared a heart and liver) and most likely would not survive birth. As predicted, the two little boys, Josiah and Josias, were stillborn. During the pregnancy, abortion was presented as an option more than once, but Janelle says, “I was thankful for the opportunity to enjoy my babies as long as God gave them to us.” The couple also welcomed the chance to explain profound issues of life and death to their older children.78
Betsey and her husband knew that their pre-born son Jacen suffered from anencephaly (a major part of his brain and skull was missing), which meant he would likely live only a matter of days. Despite pressure to abort, they chose to carry Jacen to term and love him as long as God gave him life.79
Through an ultrasound, Marshall and Susan’s son Toby was diagnosed with Trisomy 13, which meant he would not survive long outside the womb. Asked if they wanted to abort, Susan answered, “We believe God is the giver and taker of life. If the only opportunity I have to know this child is in my womb, I don’t want to cut that time short. If the only world he is to know is the womb, I want that world to be as safe as I can make it.”80
In these and many other cases, parents are choosing life over death.
Christians are also coming up with ingenious solutions to the moral issues posed by modern technology. Consider embryo adoption. Research that destroys embryos is often justified by the fact that in vitro fertilization (IVF) produces excess embryos. IVF is a process in which eggs are extracted from the wife and fertilized by her husband’s sperm in a Petri dish. The resulting embryos are then implanted in the wife. Typically many more embryos are created than are actually implanted, and the surplus embryos are either used for research or simply dumped down the drain as medical waste products.
Couples with strong moral principles often request that the clinic fertilize only the number of embryos that will actually be implanted. But that still leaves the question of what to do about the extra embryos that IVF clinics are creating for other couples. In some cases, the extra embryos are frozen and preserved in case the couple wants more children. Amazingly, when these frozen embryos are thawed and implanted in the mother’s womb, they gestate and develop exactly as in a normal pregnancy. These tiny persons have been dubbed “snowflake” babies.
If frozen embryos can be implanted, why not offer them for adoption? Organizations such as Nightlight Christian Adoptions and the National Embryo Donation Center bring couples and clinics together to facilitate frozen embryo adoption. A friend and colleague of mine at Houston Baptist University, Bruce Gordon, discovered that he and his wife were unable to have children. Across the country, another Christian couple suffering fertility issues had undergone in vitro fertilization and had two extra frozen embryos. Bruce and his wife adopted them and were happy to have their own family that way.
What are the advantages of embryo adoption? “It’s much cheaper than ordinary adoption,” Bruce said. “And it gives parents the opportunity to be in control of prenatal care to ensure a healthy baby—no smoking or drinking.”
“Babies also bond with their parents while still in the womb,” added his wife Mari-Anne. According to one report, “Fetuses can hear in the womb, and, as a result, newborn babies are already familiar with their mothers’ voices. In experiments using playbacks of recorded voices, newborns prefer their mothers’ voices to the voices of other women.”81
I read the Gordons’ contract drawn up by the fertility clinic, and it was almost comical to see the complex verbal gymnastics employed to avoid acknowledging that the frozen embryo is a human person. The procedure was not described as an embryo adoption but as a “tissue transplant.” The embryo itself was a “cryopreserved specimen” consisting of “biological materials” intended to “achieve a pregnancy.” What could possibly “achieve a pregnancy” except a living human embryo?
Embryo adoption is proving to be an innovative and humane strategy to preserve the lives of already living tiny humans and give them the chance to be raised by loving parents.
Total Care for the Total Person
Another example of practical solutions is the rise of hospice care. Most people do not know that the hospice movement has Christian roots. It was the brainchild of an English medical humanitarian, Dame Cecily Saunders, in the 1960s, and it arose directly from her deep Anglican faith. After years of working with dying patients as a hospital social worker, she longed to come up with a better strategy.
Physicians trained solely in a scientific outlook tend to see the body as little more than systems of cells and organs. In recent decades, as medical technology advanced, patients were dying shut up in isolated, sterile, institutional settings, surrounded by strangers, hooked up to machines, and often subject to painful and invasive treatments. That form of medical treatment might prolong their physical life, but it did not address the needs of the whole person. In fact, much of the push for euthanasia and assisted suicide is a reaction against such a cold, inhumane approach—one that treats patients as merely physical systems whose physical life must be prolonged at all costs.
The concept behind the hospice movement is that patients are whole persons, not just physical organisms. Saunders said, “I coined the term ‘total pain,’ from my understanding that dying people have physical, spiritual, psychological, and social pain that must be treated.”82 For many people, the greatest pain in dying is the emotional isolation.
Saunders argued that medical care should be balanced by other forms of care: palliative care to manage pain, psychological counseling for emotional support, and practical aid for the caregiving family. In hospice care, everything is aimed at allowing the patient to live as fully as possible in the final months, with a clear mind, surrounded by family and friends. Often patients find that this becomes a time to resolve conflicts in relationships, strengthen bonds with those they love, and work through the spiritual challenge of facing their mortality. It can be a profoundly meaningful stage of their lives.
Hospice care has even changed the minds of some non-Christians. Ian Haines, an oncologist who describes himself as a secular humanist, used to believe “that euthanasia was the only humane solution. I no longer believe that.” What changed his mind? As Haines explains, pain management techniques have advanced to the point where most patients no longer suffer excruciating pain but are able to engage in meaningful activities. There are “opportunities for patients and families to share deep and poignant moments of bonding and reflection, or nurse a new-born grandchild, or attend a wedding or a graduation.” Pro-death advocates defend euthanasia as “death with dignity.” But Haines concludes, “I have seen palliative care reach the point where the terminally ill can die with equal or more dignity than euthanasia will provide.”83
Sadly, this is becoming a minority view in bioethics today, even in the hospice movement. Many hospice professionals are accepting the two-story worldview that justifies euthanasia and assisted suicide. As one euthanasia advocate put it, they are transforming “hospice into hemlock.”84
No Dissent in the Culture of Death
What bioethicists debate eventually becomes law, enforced through the courts. This is already happening in countries that have legalized assisted suicide. In Holland in 2015, a doctor was sued for refusing to sign off on a request by a patient for the drugs to commit suicide. In Belgium in 2016, a Catholic nursing home was sued for refusing to allow a doctor to give a woman a lethal injection on church-run premises.85
In the culture of death, no dissent is allowed.
What this means is that eventually Christian medical professionals around the globe may be forced by law to act against their biblical convictions—or lose their jobs and shut down their healthcare facilities. It is imperative to act now to persuade our colleagues, neighbors, students, and children of a more humane view of life.
A biblical view is desperately needed in the realm of sex ethics as well. As we move to the next chapter, we will discover that, surprisingly, secular sex ethics is based on the same two-story body/person dualism that drives abortion and euthanasia. When we grasp how the divided view of the human being shapes the hookup culture, we will be better equipped to speak healing truth into today’s sexual chaos.