Is an Embryo a Baby?

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Is an Embryo a Baby?

May 2, 2024

Questions about whether the fact that you can freeze an embryo but not a baby proves an embryo isn’t a baby and whether it would be wrong to use IVF with genetic testing to avoid carrying a baby with an inherited genetic disorder that always results in stillbirth.

* Putting a baby in a freezer would kill it, but freezing an embryo would keep it alive. Does that prove an embryo isn’t a baby?

* Would it be wrong to use IVF with genetic testing to prevent carrying a baby with an inherited genetic disorder that always results in stillbirth?

Transcript

I'm Amy Hall. I'm here with Greg Koukl and welcome to Stand to Reason's hashtag, S-T-R-A-S-K podcast. Hi, Greg.

Okay, we're going to start today with a question from Courtney. A family member whose pro-choice reposted and exposed, stating putting a baby in a freezer would kill it, but freezing embryos keeps it alive. That's why an embryo is in the baby.

Seems to be a logical fallacy there, can't put my finger on it, new to apologetics, would appreciate your thoughts. Well, the difficulty here, if I'm understanding this correctly, is that we are using conventional terms to identify stages of development. Instead of using a more precise term about the nature of the individual in question, regardless of the stage of development.

So an embryo is the, well, a zygote is the first stage of development of a new human being. An embryo is the next stage. A fetus is the next stage.

A fully formed child is the next, that baby is being ready to be delivered, and once it's delivered, now it's a newborn, and then it becomes a toddler, and then it becomes a, I don't know what you call them, just like a terrible twos, then becomes a, you know, a school age kid, and then a teenager, or an adolescent, and then a young adult, and then an adult, and then an old person. Notice that these are all just ways that we, as a matter of convention, have chosen words that identify a certain period of development of the same individual. And what's happened is the terminology has sometimes mistakenly been taken as different kinds of individuals at different stages.

Oh, that's not a, that's not a human, that's a zygote, that's not a human, that's a fetus. But actually what they end up saying is they say, well, it's not a baby, it's a zygote, and that's what we have here. That's not a baby, it's a fetus, all right.

But of course, when we use the term baby to describe what is developing inside a pregnant woman, we are using a standard way of referring to the unborn human that is developing there, and we say, look, it doesn't matter what trimester they're in, we say to our friend, the pregnant woman, how's your baby doing? So this is a standard way of referring to it. Now as people constrain in that, well, it's not a baby, it's a fetus. Well, that they're misunderstanding how we're using the word baby, we mean you're offspring, but it's not a dehumanizing way of putting it.

People talk about oftentimes when they are pro-abortion, they try to dehumanize by not using baby language, instead using fetus or zygote language, as if this thing that's going in there is something other than a human. Living things do not change from one kind of living thing to another kind of living thing as they move through their stages of development. This is just simple biology.

Well, an acorn's not an oak that people will say, well, of course it is. No, it isn't, it's a seed. Okay, what kind of seed is it? Well, it's an oak seed.

In other words, it's an oak in the seed stage. All right. And then you have an oak in a sapling stage and a mature stage, et cetera, et cetera, but they're oaks throughout.

And what needs to be clear for us is that these stages and the terms we use to apply to these stages, even first trimester, second trimester, third trimester, these are artificial characterizations to help us to identify stages of growth of that child, baby, unborn human as it proceeds through the biological process of growth. But they should, these terms should never be used to somehow diminish what the thing that's growing actually is. And from the moment of conception, you have a unique individual full human being that merely needs the appropriate care for that human being to go through all the normal stages of development, and not just up until birth, but all the way through the entire life.

Okay? No living thing looks the same at one stage of its development than it does at another. Just go online and look at the high school pictures of famous movie stars. Find them, you know, and, you know, we get a laugh out of that, even when we look at our own pictures, because we realize human living things change over time.

But it doesn't change what the living thing actually is. And this is why I focus on the term human being, because that's the thing, proper classification of that growing thing inside of mom that continues to grow after that growing thing is now growing outside of mom. And it still is what it is.

And if it has intrinsic value as a human being, to have intrinsic value means it's part of the nature of being human. So as long as you have the human, you have the value. It's intrinsic, it can't be taken out.

I was asking a question once, from people who agreed that the human beings have intrinsic value, and then what was said is, but when do they get intrinsic value? Now, obviously, an Amy's chuckling here, you can't see that, because that misunderstands the whole notion of intrinsic value. There is no when a being with intrinsic value gets intrinsic value. It is part of being what it is.

So as long as it is being, it has those things that are essential and intrinsic to its nature, in this case, value. One way you can help avoid this confusion between stages and being is by the way you refer to the embryo or the fetus or the baby. And what I like to do is to use both terms, stage and being.

So I'll say the fetal human being, or the embryonic human being, or the baby human being. That way, it's clear that you're talking about a stage of a kind of being, and that confusion, it's more difficult for it to happen. Now, when people hear that, they might be a little surprised, because they haven't really thought about this.

But I think that's one thing we can do to prevent this confusion. So when you have someone who says an embryonic human being isn't a baby human being, I absolutely agree. We agree.

They're not. But neither is a baby human being, an adult human being. Correct.

They're different. They're just stages of development, as Greg explained. Or you might even say a human in a fetal stage, or a human in the embryonic stage, or something like that.

Yeah, as long as you include both of those in there so they can see that there's no changing of the human part, that stays the same. Now, you can think about it this way. If you took an adult human being and you put it into embryonic fluid, the adult human being would die.

Even though a baby human being in a womb, or a fetal human being in the womb, can survive that. It requires it. It requires it.

It doesn't mean that the adult isn't a human being, just because it will die if it's put in a state that another stage of human being can survive. That doesn't matter. At different stages, we need different things.

But that doesn't change what we are. It doesn't mean that we're different kinds of beings. It just means that we require different things in different stages.

Excellent. So hopefully you can help your family member understand that. By the way, this question that I offered, it's not at a, or at this point, it's not at oak.

It's a seed. What kind of seed? That same question can be asked of every stage. Well, it's a fetus.

Okay, what kind of fetus? It's an embryo. It's a zygote. What kind of embryo? What kind of zygote? It's a human embryo, a human zygote.

Okay, and that's a way of kind of a little end around a tactical maneuver that will help continue to make the point when people try to dismiss the full humanity of the unborn in any stage by focusing it in on the stage. Okay, Greg, we're going to move on to a question from Laura. And this is a, this is a very emotionally difficult one.

She asks, my husband and I recently lost our daughter to stillbirth and discovered that she had a condition that we now know we are both recessive carriers of. Is it wrong to use IVF with genetic testing in the future? This condition will always result in stillbirth. Well, it depends what the IVF or genetic testing is meant to discover.

If the genetic testing is of an in vitro zygote or developing child human in the terms that we were talking about, and the testing amounts to nothing more than a search and destroy mission. And that's what amniocentesis often is, different circumstance than this. But if amniocentesis is to determine if there's a genetic problem, a lot of times it's Down syndrome, Iceland has brag that they've eliminated Down syndrome almost entirely.

Well, they haven't eliminated Down syndrome. They've eliminated Down babies by killing them before they're born. And they find out through amniocentesis.

It may be helpful to find out if you want to do a testing like that, which isn't dangerous to the developing human of that. I don't know if it's going to be helpful to find out that that child is carrying that gene and is going to be still born as well. I'm not sure if that's a good idea.

But if it's just for that purpose, I don't see a problem there. As long as there's no danger to the child. If it's a search and destroy mission, that's entirely different.

If a child has a genetic defect, a before-birth defect, what do they call it? Is that what they call it? A prenatal defect that is lethal. Then how is it justified to kill the child instead of letting the child die of the lethal physical problem? I mean, there's a huge difference there, although in a lot of thinking nowadays, this is what's the deal. That baby's going to die anyway.

Yes. In the first case, it dies in natural causes. In the second case, it dies at your hand.

Don't you see the difference, the moral difference between those two options? If there is a child that looks like is not going to survive the pregnancy, I mean all other issues of health of the mother aside. When I say health, I mean lethal threat to the mother. Then let the pregnancy run its course and if the baby dies, it dies.

By the way, there are a whole lot of times when doctors predict the baby's going to die and it doesn't die. Or the baby has this terrible genetic defect and is born alive. Then they're able to have the child with them for a few weeks or a few months and sometimes even a few years.

We have a friend of standard reasons that has been in that circumstance. Now they had to say goodbye to that little girl when she is four years old. Is that hard? Yeah, that's hard.

But it's worse if that child dies earlier at your own hand. It's morally worse. And so if what you're trying to do is save emotional anguish by taking the life of the child instead of letting nature take its course, then you have done something morally grotesque.

Rather than me feel the bad pain, I'm just going to kill the one that will be causing the pain to me or at least the aggravated pain in the future. This is not on the table for us with any human being. I can't even imagine the pain that they were going through knowing that their child was going to die and I completely understand wanting to avoid that.

The problem is that, and Greg, you were talking about the, you know, when a child is developing the womb, what I think she's actually asking, I don't think this changes anything that you've said, but I think she's asking, is it okay to use IVF and then they choose, they look to see which ones are going to die and then they only implant the ones that aren't going to die, but I think everything that you said applies to that because you're still creating human beings and you're still killing them. Even in vitro. Right.

So I don't think that changes just because they're not inside the mother. And it's just not okay to kill people who are terminally ill. We don't kill people who are terminally ill just to save us pain.

And what we do is we give palliative care and we care for them as long as we can. That's right. So it's interesting to use that phrase terminally ill because that's usually applied to people at the end of life, but it applies here too.

Here you have an embryo. You have a developing human being in the womb that is terminally ill and that illness would probably take their life before they're born or at the time of they're born. So I don't know if you had more to say.

I jumped in there. No, it's okay. I do have more to say and it has to do it.

Now, I'm going to say before I move on to talking about people who might have a child that they just found out is going to die. Going back to embryos, you can adopt embryos. If you really want to carry a child and you're worried that you will have a child who's going to be still born because of the risk of genetic factors, you can actually adopt embryos from people who created too many embryos and they're just sitting there frozen as we said.

And I think that's a great option for you. The organization is called Snowflake or at least one of them. And actually my wife and I did that.

Now, we were not successful because we had lost a child earlier and first trimester and then we had an in vitro for ourselves and those babies didn't survive. So we adopted embryo for our final shot and my wife carrying didn't work out, which by the way, just so you know, ladies, wives, husbands, this is very demanding on a woman emotionally. Physically, the whole process is demanding and if it's unsuccessful, it's very traumatic.

Even though it's in vitro or adopting an embryo, it can still be very emotionally painful because to a woman that they've still lost their babies. But this a great suggestion for those who have genetic anomalies, they would pass down to their children that could be lethal and don't even go the route of your own genetics, take someone else's. That's great.

And I will also say, I mean, beyond the issue of not doing IVF because you will be doing it specifically to destroy the embryonic human beings who have this genetic problem, I actually, I don't think that we should be taking part in IVF at all. And the reason why I say that is because I have seen what that is, this whole industry is creating. So the reason why we have embryos to adopt is because there are over a million, I think more than they need.

And we have all of these human beings who are just sitting there and being treated as commodities, yes, you have all of these these weird laws where they're treated as property and someone can demand that they be killed and it creates all sorts of problems. And it's changing the way we view human value and children. And this idea that we can create, pick out which ones we want as if we're buying some sort of a commodity.

I think it's really, I think it's been damaging. And that's not to say if that's how you got your child. Well, I mean, hopefully you did it in a way where you didn't have to kill any other children.

But if, you know, obviously if something went wrong and we've had, we've had emails from people who ended up with as many as 25 embryos and they didn't know what to do with them. And I just don't want you to put yourself in that position where you have to deal with all these other things. So I would recommend against that and we actually have many things on our website.

Alan and I did an episode of the podcast where we talked about IVF and all the issues with that. So let me add a couple of thoughts to that since you brought that up. First of all, in the case of my wife and I, we only had, I'm trying to think, I think we had three eggs fertilized because we knew that my wife could carry three of all of them worked.

Okay. So it wasn't like, let's put 10 in. A bunch are going to die.

But then we have five. So now we have what they call a selective reduction, which is just a fancy term for an abortion of those that survive. So in IVF, if you're going to do it, you want to do it in a way that avoids that difficulty that you're identifying.

Right. Also, if I, the second point is, if I understand you're right, you're not seeing that in vitro fertilization is itself immoral, but it leads to consequences that are questionable. Is that what you're saying? Yeah.

I don't want to put words in your mouth. But what I'm saying is I think it was always going to lead here because of the way it treats human beings. And I mean, I, I do think there are ways like you personally could, you know, could, could only create the number that you're willing to carry.

But even in that case, you're always, there's always a risk of what if something happens? Your spouse dies before you implant. You know, there's all the sorts of, of risks I don't think people think about. But I hear about, because people email me about them once they've happened.

So I think you can make it so that you don't personally create any children that are killed or, or, or frozen or whatever that is. But now, but I think that just the fact that it's always, it was always a matter of, it was always going to lead to a place where people are going to choose and, and go down this path. I think the industry itself is, is going to be a problem.

Okay. So I think this is a good example of another broader point, an ethical point. And this has to do with slippery slopes.

And there are, there are slippery slope fallacies, but there are actually two types of slippery slopes that are very legitimate. And this is an example of one. And this is called a causal slippery slope.

And that is where you have an action that taken in isolation in itself, is not a moral action. But that action then leads naturally to other things that are immoral, that cast aspersions on the action itself. And now Roman Catholics would say, or I should say Roman Catholicism would say, not all Roman Catholics agree with Roman Catholicism.

So Roman Catholicism would say that in vitro fertilization is itself a harm. It's, it's wrong. My sense is you're not saying in vitro itself is wrong.

But when you look at the kind of industry that's been produced in all the harm that follows from it, that, that kind of cast aspersions on the, on the actions itself. So it's, it's called a causal slippery slope. It caught, it's not wrong in itself, but it leads to other things that are wrong.

If you're not careful. And so therefore that puts in question the action itself, which is why you recommend. You say, I think the whole thing is a mistake.

Well, and I wouldn't have said this 10 years ago, but it's been over time as I've seen how things have progressed and the way people are talking about embryos. I can't remember some, there was a state recently and I can't remember which one. I can't believe it, but the, the Supreme Court of the state declared that the embryos were human beings and, and people were saying, well, this has all sorts of consequences.

Now, what are we going to do if we have all these embryos left over? And what are we going to do? I'm like, yes, that's the question. There are consequences. And what you can't do is dismiss the facts because you don't like the consequences.

You have to start with the facts. Well, the funny thing is they weren't even acknowledging that there's consequences the other way. Like if they're human beings, there are consequences.

If you, if you create a bunch of extra ones and then you freeze them and, and, and, and, and, and they were saying like, now we're going to have to protect them. And now we're going to have to, yes, they're human beings. Right.

There are consequences to creating human beings. We all recognize this. So it's just the way people have started thinking about it.

I think this has taken time. I don't think necessarily this is how it was right at the beginning. But I think, anyway, I think that's where we are now.

And then I, I have one more thing to say about going back to the, the, going away from us now back to fetal human beings in the womb. There was an article I, I wrote about on our website. So you could probably find it if you go there.

It was an article in a 2018 journal of clinical ethics. And here's what it found. It was setting women who had babies that were terminally ill and they were going to die.

And the question was, how did those fair who carried the child to term versus those who had an abortion? Oh, interesting. And it said 97% do not regret giving birth. They actually were glad that they had carried the child to term.

I think many people assume that they will, they will save themselves pain if they, in the life of their child. But the truth is you, you don't because your child is still dies, but now it's at your hand. Did that show up in the, the other half or the other side of the analysis? 97% said that they're glad to carry.

Did it, did they say what happened to the other half? I'm not sure about that because I wrote a, I, I read a summary of the article. I didn't actually read the whole article in the journal, but here, here is a quote from the article, women who terminated reported significant, significantly more despair avoidance and depression than women who continue the pregnancy. Yeah.

So I don't have a number, but I, I do have that. Yeah. Interesting.

And probably if you looked at the article, you could, oh, I don't have the title here. Maybe I have it over here. The title was, I would do it all over again.

Cherishing time and the absence of regret in continuing a pregnancy after a life limiting diagnosis. So we assume that we will save ourselves pain, but the truth is that we won't. And it's, it's a painful situation, no matter what, don't add more to it.

Yeah. I have a close family, friends at the parents in the family and they, there was at night their 10th child was stillborn at birth and they had the chance of experiencing the birth, holding that baby in the last moments of its life, naming the child and then having a service. And when you ask them how many children they have, they always say 10.

We lost one early, but there were 10 in our family, you know. So that's I think even as painful as that was, there was a salutary element there as they honored this member of their family, not a de facto member, an actual member. That just appeared to be a member.

This was a member of their family. They treated it as such and they still have just very strong memories, positive memories of this experience that was emotionally difficult. So we're sorry, Laura, to hear about your situation.

That's just horribly painful and I hope God comforts you and you're able to have a child or adopt a child or adopt an embryo or whatever it is and that you will have children in the future. So thank you for your question and thank you, Courtney. We appreciate hearing from you.

You can send us your question on X with the hashtag STRS or go to our website at STR.org. This is Amy Hall and great Coco for Stand to Reason.