Does a Fetus Have Rights or Doesn't It?
By Andrew Coyne

On the CBC, Maureen McTeer-lawyer, feminist and freelance medical ethicist-was ticking off the reasons she opposed the harvesting of stem cells from human embryos for medical research, as would be permitted under proposed federal guidelines. She was passionate, even immoderate at times.

It was an affront to human dignity, she said. From the moment the egg was fertilized, it became part of "the human continuum." To allow the killing of embryos before the proposed 14-day limit and not after was a specious distinction, an attempt to obscure the enormity of what we were doing by denying the humanity of the lives we were destroying. Nazi scientists, she said, shrugged that the victims of their experiments were "only Jews." Now we were saying "it's only a fetus."

At which point, one of her befuddled fellow panellists felt compelled to ask: "Aren't you pro-choice?"

There, in microcosm, is a portrait of the ethical confusion that surrounds this debate. It isn't just Ms. McTeer whose views are in profound conflict with themselves. The government of Canada, sponsor of the research to be covered by the new rules and author of pending legislation on which they are based, is twisted into the same contradictory pose: attempting to define and assert the state's interest in the rights of the fetus, while officially denying that it has any-at least, as far as that would imply any legal restriction on abortion.

Ms. McTeer attempted to square the circle this way. When it comes to a conflict between the rights of the child in utero and the rights of the expectant mother, "we have decided" that the mother's rights "trump" those of the fetus. The rights of medical researchers, on the other hand, do not carry the same weight.

For the record, "we" have not decided any such thing. No act of Parliament decreed that Canada, alone among the developed world, should have no abortion law of any kind. Nor was it even decided by the courts. Quite the contrary: the Supreme Court, in the 1988 Morgentaler decision that struck down the old abortion law, explicitly allowed for the possibility of a redrafted law passing constitutional muster, to which task the government and the Parliament of Canada soon addressed themselves.

At length, in 1992, a compromise bill, allowing abortion under some circumstances and forbidding it in others, was passed by the House of Commons. The only reason it did not become law was that the Senate, that revered icon of democracy, refused to pass it. Or rather, it died on a tie vote. Not even the Senate actually voted to plunge us into the legal void we now inhabit.

At any rate, let's return to Ms. McTeer's ethical bridge game. A pregnant woman has an unrestricted right in law to kill the fetus she carries, right up until the moment of birth: because she does not want to interrupt her career, because she doesn't care for the father, it doesn't matter. She holds "trumps." A scientist, however, may not do the same to another fetus in the course of extracting embryonic stem cells, even in the first 14 days, in pursuit of medical advances that-who knows?-might save millions of lives.

But Ms. McTeer is a beacon of moral clarity beside the federal guidelines themselves. It isn't just the 14-day rule, of which she is justly critical. The guidelines would also distinguish between the creation of new embryos purely for medical research purposes-which would be off limits-and the use of existing embryos left over from in vitro fertilization procedures, or the tissue of aborted fetuses, which would be allowed. In fact, more than allowed, it would be eligible for federal funding.

So: It's all right to create a fetus, by artificial means. And it's all right to destroy a fetus, whether that is the point of the exercise or merely the unfortunate by-product of experimenting upon it. You just can't destroy a fetus that you yourself have created, or create one for the purpose of destroying it-although if someone else does this, that's another thing again: In addition to scavenging through abortionists' dumpsters, the rules would permit researchers to import stem cells from foreign laboratories.

The two procedures, creation and destruction, are treated as if they could be kept in perfect isolation from each other-as if, say, scientists could not easily pretend to create embryos for one reason, and use them for another. Indeed, no sooner had the guidelines been drafted than the push began to weaken them. "It may be at some point that we have to petition for the creation of human embryos [for stem cell research]," one researcher was quoted as saying. There's much more to object to here-the laughable provisions for "informed consent" from the embryos' "owners," the presumption of a granting agency in drafting guidelines in advance of Parliament having been presented with legislation, to say nothing of the unproven need for embryonic stem cells in the first place, given the availability of similar material from living adults and other sources. But underlying all is the issue no one wants to confront: of the legal and intellectual absurdities to which we are increasingly driven by an abortion regime no one voted for.