Here I will show how the key truth that every living human body is a person bears upon other hotly debated bioethical issues of our day such as the artificial generation of human life, abortion, euthanasia, defining death, etc.
 
Anthropology and moral thought
Over 30 years ago, Germain Grisez declared: “Christian moral thought must remain grounded in a sound anthropology which maintains the bodiliness of the person. Such moral thought sees personal biological, not merely generically animal biological, meaning and value in human sexuality. The bodies which become one flesh in sexual intercourse are persons; their unity in a certain sense forms a single person, the potential procreator from whom the personal, bodily reality of a new human individual flows in material, bodily, personal continuity.” [1] Precisely because their dualistic anthropology severs the person from his or her body, secular bioethicists and dissenting Catholic writers easily justify killing innocent people. If the person really is not his body, then the destruction of the life of the body is not directly and in itself an attack on a good intrinsic to the human person. Grisez’s 1974 essay foreshadowed what Pope John Paul II noted in his 1981 apostolic exhortation on the Role of the Christian Family in the Modern World (Familiaris Consortio) when he said: “the difference, both anthropological and moral, between contraception and recourse to the rhythm of the cycle…is a difference which is much wider and deeper than is usually thought, one which involves in the final analysis two irreconcilable concepts of the human person and of human sexuality” (no. 32, 6).

Artificial Generation of human life
When married men and women generate human life they are not “making” products like love or babies. Rather, they are “doing” something, namely, “giving and receiving love” from one another in the marital act; love is not a product but a “gift of self-donation.” Nor are babies products one makes, because a product is inferior to its producers and subject to quality controls, and those products which do not “measure up” to standards are usually discarded and thrown away. Human babies are, like their parents, irreplaceable persons who cannot be substituted; in the marital act they “are begotten, not made.” But “dualistic anthropologists” do in fact treat the generation of  human life as an act of production subject to quality controls. A male produces sperm, a female produces an ovum or ova, the raw material for the end product, while technicians manipulate the raw material into a product or now a number of products called zygotes that develop into embryos that are then implanted in the womb of some woman, perhaps a woman other than the one who produced the ovum used as raw material for the end product. Moreover, the whole process is monitored, resulting in the “products” being destroyed, or cryopreserved, or used for experimentation, if not wanted as a “baby.” Dualists transform procreation into reproduction and willingly kill living human bodies.

Abortion
With respect to scientific evidence, in a recent book Robert George and Christopher Tollefsen provide a summary of the facts of embryology as amassed by embryologists and experts in human generation. [2] The conclusion by these experts is that human zygotes, embryos, fetuses are human beings, living human bodies, at an early stage of development. The vast majority of us began at fertilization, but there are exceptions (e.g. identical twins) and it is not clear precisely when twins emerge during early development. “But this qualification has no bearing on the following point; when someone destroys a human embryo, it is a human being that is killed,” whether at conception or at the stage when identical twinning is possible, and dualists are quite willing to kill human embryos even though they are living human bodies, members of the human species.

Mercy killing or euthanasia
Mercy killing is frequently justified because of the “quality of the person’s life,” and by life here is meant a person’s bodily life. As one dualist, Richard McCormick, put the matter: “Often it is the kind of, the quality of, the life thus saved (painful, poverty stricken, and deprived, away from home and friends, oppressive) that establishes the means as extraordinary. That type of life would be an excessive hardship for the individual.”[3]  This is a common view among dualists. Integrists (my name for those who do not distinguish between a person and his body) hold that it is morally permissible to withhold/withdraw treatments that are burdensome or “disproportionate/extraordinary,” but that bodily life itself is a great good, a gift from God no matter how burdensome.

Other dualists, for example Floyd Bloom (a member of the now defunct President’s Council on Bioethics who in fact held a position on brain death incompatible with a White Paper published by the Council in December 2008), regard as already dead individuals whose cortex has been destroyed even if they can breathe on their own, assimilate food and water etc. Thus at a meeting of the Council in 2007 he declared: “I belong to that reductionistic biological group…all of whom will take the position that a person in that state without the capacity for consciousness may have a living body but is not a person [emphasis added]…. I don’t understand why that is not correct. The fact that the brainless [bodies in your examples] … may be alive in some aspects in no way eliminates the fact that they are still dead as human beings [emphasis added].”[4]

Determining death and persons in the alleged “vegetative” state
We have just seen Bloom’s defense of neocortical death and denial that persons in the alleged “vegetative state” are persons despite his own commission’s rejection of that definition. In fact D. Alan Shewmon, M.D., in a series of studies supported by empirical evidence, demonstrated that the conventional apologia for holding that a person was dead if there was irreversible cessation of the functioning of the entire brain (an apologia that had been standard from the mid-seventies) was terribly flawed. He had video tapes of several individuals who were declared dead by reason of brain death, persons who were still assimilating food/hydration, spontaneously healing from minor cuts and even pneumonia (all lived in Japan where their mothers took them home, kept them on respirators and cared for them). One, whom Shewmon calls “T.K.” was four years old when declared brain dead; he survived until he was over nineteen years old!  Shewmon’s evidence and  arguments were so conclusive that Leon Kass, the first chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics, accepted Shewmon’s critique of the rationale used until then, 2007, and presented his findings to the President’s Council.  Kass then developed a new rationale to support a brain death criterion and this rationale was used in the White Paper referred to previously. However, Shewmon and others find the new rationale inadequate.

But dualists regularly consider individuals said to be in the “vegetative” state as nonpersons and countenance killing them (or they might say “allowing them to die”)  by withholding/withdrawing   food and hydration provided by tubes inserted into the stomach and not intravenously.  These people are misinformed of what this condition is. Persons said to be vegetative are not suffering from a fatal pathology that will cause them to die shortly; rather they are in a stable condition and will live so long as food and hydration are provided. For persons suffering from a fatal pathology that will cause their death very shortly, it would usually be morally permissible not to attempt to give them food and hydration by tubal means.  Persons alleged to be in the “vegetative” state can  swallow on their own if food is put far back in their mouths. They are fed by tubes for the convenience of their care givers because spoon feeding takes a long time; their ability to swallow then atrophies. But they are in a relatively stable condition and can live for years so long as they receive food and hydration.[5]

A remarkable article by Jerome Groupman, “Silent Minds,” in the October 2007 issue of the New Yorker shows that recent scientific evidence indicates that persons alleged to be in the persistent “vegetative state” may be aware of their environment. He refers to the work of Adrian Owen in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science in 2009. This article showed that “doctors can miss signs of consciousness in vegetative patients, according to the British and American studies.”  “Owen and others tested on an MRI one woman whose brain… in response to a command to play tennis, showed normal activity in the regions that mediate arm movements. Owen now repeats scans for each patient, conducting them twice a day for three days.” (I have here paraphrased some of the text for reasons of space). “Despite the patient’s very poor behavioral status, the MRI findings indicate the existence of a rich mental life, including auditory language processing and the ability to perform mental imagery tasks,” Naccache wrote.

We assimilate information unconsciously all the time; at any given moment, we process thousands of stimuli, of which we pay attention to only a few. As you read this sentence, you may not be aware of the birds singing in the back yard, but your brain has analyzed the sound and concluded that it poses no threat to you. In the past several decades, scientists have uncovered particularly dramatic examples of unconscious processing. In the early seventies, researchers at M.I.T. studied four patients who had experienced trauma to an area of the brain involved in vision and had been found to have a condition that was later called “blindsight.” These patients’ eyes functioned normally, but they did not perceive much of what was in their field of vision. When the researchers flashed a light at the patients and asked them to describe what they saw, the patients reported that they had seen nothing. Yet the researchers noticed that their eyes often located the source of the light. In a second experiment, a blindsight patient was shown pictures of faces displaying happiness, sadness, anger, and fear. The patient said that he could not see the faces, yet he was frequently able to correctly identify the emotions. The researchers concluded that, despite the patient’s injuries, pathways in his brain had been preserved which allowed him to process at least some visual data, even though he wasn’t consciously aware of doing so.

Conclusion
In this essay I have sought to show the serious divisions in contemporary thought between “dualists,” i.e., those who distinguish between “persons” and “living human bodies,” and those who hold that every living human body is indeed a “person” (I call them “integrists) regarding such heated topics as abortion, the artificial generation of human life, euthanasia, and the care of persons alleged to be in the “persistent vegetative state.”

I think that here I have shown how the dualists can justify killing those whom they hold to be merely biologically, but not personally, alive. Moreover, the criteria for personhood among dualists differ widely.  The criteria, in short, are highly relative.

______________________________

[1] Germain Grisez,“Dualism and the New Morality,” in Atti del Congresso Internazionale (Roma-Napoli, 12-17 aprile 1974): Tommaso d’Aquino nel suo Settimo Centenario, Vol. 5, L’Agire Morale (Napoli: Edizioni Domenicane Italiane, 1975), p. 330. Grisez’s essays

[2] Robert George and Christopher Tollefsen, Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (New York: Doubleday 2008.)

[3] Richard McCormick, How Brave a New World: Dilemmas in Bioethics (New York: Doubleday, 1981), p. 347.

[4]  See http://www.bioethics.gov/transcripts/nov07/session5.html; the transcript of the Friday, November 9 meeting of the Council.

[5] On this see Consortium of Jesuit Bioethics Programs, “Undue Burden? The Vatican and Artificial Nutrition and Hydration,” Commoweal, Feb. 13, 2009, Vol. CXXXVI, No. 3.

(c) Culture of Life Foundation 2009.  Reproduction granted with attribution required.