“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.” – Psalms 139:13

Well, beloved reader, we had only just begun our weekly walks together to try and find clarity on our state’s political issues. Now we already reach the shoreline between what is knowable and what is largely unknowable.

The Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling last week that in vitro fertilization clinics could be subject to lawsuits, under Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, when embryos in a clinic’s possession are destroyed without parental permission. This act allows parents of deceased children to receive financial compensation if someone is found to be at fault for the death.

This forces us to take on the impossible task of figuring out when the ghost enters the machine or, stated more plainly, when an organism is a person. It is a question of legal, moral, philosophical and religious concern.

Psalms 139:13 would seem to imply personhood begins at conception, but does the same principle apply when the first rows of stitches are knit in a laboratory setting?

Politically, pro-life conservatives have to grapple with the meaning of the phrase, “Life begins at conception.” Many have distanced themselves from the court’s decision.

State Sen. Tim Melson, R-Florence, told the Alabama Reflector, “We all know that conception is a big argument that it’s life. I won’t argue that point, but it’s not going to form into a life until it’s put into the uterus.”

Many people have a hard time seeing a microscopic collection of biological material as a person, particularly if the material is not implanted into a womb and is stored in a clinic freezer. On the other hand, many people also have a hard time seeing a fully formed fetus at or near the full term of a pregnancy that would be viable outside of the womb as not being a person.

Of course the problem is there is not much agreement at what point in between you have a person. Heartbeat? Viability outside the womb with medical assistance? Without medical assistance? First, second or third trimester? Science does not offer a clear way to determine this.

With a lack of federal legislation on the topic, federal courts also have been unable to make a definitive decision with the U.S. Supreme Court moving from providing limited protections for women to have an abortion after Roe v. Wade in 1973 to punting on the issue altogether and leaving it up to the states to decide their own abortion policies in the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.

Who am I to tell you when a person is a person? I am thankful explaining at what point a soul imbues a physical setting was not a requirement in my dissertation. Nevertheless, I feel it would be dishonest not to provide you with some kind of opinion. So here it goes.

When a sperm and egg combine it quickly creates a human’s genetic makeup or blueprint. This blueprint is present in every cell as the egg splits into more and more cells creating an embryo.

Your genetic makeup determines a great deal of what your future will be as a fully formed adult, such as appearance, intelligence, and, unfortunately, even your likelihood of developing some diseases or disorders. Combined with your environment, this makes you what you are.

However, granting legal personhood to an embryo carries its own set of problems such as is it murder or manslaughter if a clinic technician accidentally destroys an embryo.

Given this information and no real objective way for a government to determine personhood before birth, there should be a way to grant limited legal rights for all forms of human life before birth both inside and outside the womb.

Let me add here we should always give primacy to the person already in the world, so expecting mothers, whose life or long-term health could be at risk, should never be required to carry through the entire pregnancy process nor should mothers face any penalty if a fetus does not survive due to circumstances beyond the mother’s control.

As strange as it may seem to provide legal rights to an embryo, I think there should be consistent protection all the way from fertilized egg to full-term fetus – though not quite full personhood. Unfortunately, this likely is not conducive to the operation of IVF clinics as it may be cost prohibitive only to fertilize and implant one egg at a time and storing fertilized eggs indefinitely is obviously problematic in this scenario. While I have much sympathy for couples who struggle to get pregnant, I also cannot ignore there is value in those tiny embryos.