From small beginnings
Colin Brewer
The successful delivery of Mrs Lesley Brown's much-publicised test-tube baby has set a number of interesting ethical cats among the theological pigeons. Some of these ethical issues are, as yet, highly speculative, such as the possibility of selecting for implantatiorronly embryos of a particular sex and consigning the others to the waste-pipe, but one issue is of considerable current interest and is of crucial relevance to the apparently interminable debate about the rights and wrongs of abortion.
Few ordinary people seem to have very strong feelings about the human foetus in its earliest stages of development. The Roman Catholic church used to share this rather casual attitude and did not regard abortion as a serious matter before the `ensoulmene of the foetus, which was held to occur at forty days gestation for a male foetus and eighty days for a female. Only in 1869 under Pius IX did the church plump for the view that the humanity of the foetus began at the moment of fertilisation. This is also the official view of the Church of England and, according to Professor Glanville Williams, of the law of England. Within the past year, the Director of Public Prosecutions has stopped a gynaecologist from performing 'menstrual regulation' in which the womb is scraped out within days after a missed period before it is certain whether or not the woman is pregnant. He did so, presumably, on the grounds that destroying even tiny foetuses at a few days of gestation, without going through all the bureaucratic procedures of the 1967 Abortion Act, was illegal. The birth of the Browns' baby has focused medical and public attention on the very earliest stages of life. The embryo from which she developed was implanted in Mrs Brown's womb only a few days after fertilisation, and it reminds us that human potential in some important sense is indeed present from the moment when ovum and spermatozoon unite. For the antiabortionists, this will be seen as further proof that interference with foetal development at any stage is a kind of murder, and it was apparently at the prompting of anti-abortionists that the DPP prohibited menstrual regulation.
It is strange, therefore, that there has been so little criticism from theologians and anti-abortionists of the IUD (or intrauterine contraceptive device), popularly called 'the coil'. When IUDs first appeared, it was widely assumed that they worked by preventing fertilisation from occurring, and were thus no different in principle from other contraceptive agents. If there were any doubts as to whether the IUD might operate after fertilisation, by destroying the tiny foetus or wiping it off the surface of the womb shortly after implantation, nobody mentioned them.
Over the years, however, evidence has gradually accumulated which makes it absolutely inescapable that the IUD does indeed work after fertilisation, and that it is not a contraceptive at all but rather a pre-emptive abortifacient. Even prominent, antiabortion gynaecologists have publicly accepted this fact. It therefore follows that those who are opposed to liberal abortion
laws, on the grounds that the destruction of potential human beings ought to be sanctioned, if at all, only for the most weighty reasons of medical necessity, should be equally opposed to the IUD. Especially when it is realised that since the average IUD-wearer is probably having a very early abortion about once each month, the many thousands of IUDs in use represent by far the greatest cause of induced abortion in this country. Yet almost without exception, the anti-abortionists have been absolutely silent on this issue; even such normally voluble spokesmen as Mr Leo Abse MP, who recently marched to mark the 'murder' of a million foetuses since the passing of the Abortion Act. A case, perhaps, of de minimis non curat Leo? The IUD puts anti-abortionists in an almost impossible position, as their uniform silence testifies. If they accept it, they can no longer claim that the destruction of potential human life is wrong, and if they suggest that the foetus becomes 'human' at some point after fertilisation, they not only go against the weight of theological opinion, but would have no objective basis for drawing a dividing line. If, on the other hand, they press for abolishing or severely restricting the IUD, they risk being branded as anti-contraceptionists, and they know that they would receive little public support. They also fear that ventilating the issue will force both public and Parliament to admit that the destruction of tiny foetuses is not a very important matter, and certainly one which requires no legal regulation. The birth of the test-tube baby may well lead to public debate of the very issue which anti-abortionists fear to discuss. It will encourage people to admit that an acorn is not an oak-tree, that becoming a human being is a gradual process, and that to equate abortion with murder — at least in the early stages of pregnancy —is simply absurd. It will also force anti-abortionists to admit that deliberately destroying a small human embryo —as the researchers must have done hundreds of times during their experiments — is quite compatible with being as humane and civilised as Mr Ste ptoe and Dr Edwards appear to be, and is not something which
of Hitler can do with equanimity.
In practical terms, this may lead to an agreement that abortions should be done as early as possible when they are both safer and less productive of ethical anxieties. Abortion services must be improved and information about abortion widely disseminated among all those of, or approaching, fertile years. The Browns' baby has made history. If she survives all the publicity she may °Ile day reflect on two things. The first is why gynaecologists should be so keen to treat infertility and so reluctant to help woMe9 who wish they were less fertile. The secono is that she was implanted into her mother's womb at a time when millions of other tiny embryos were being destroyed bY IUDs.
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