Which Door Fall 1995

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Man is neither angel nor beast, and it is unfortunately the case that anyone trying to act the angel acts the beast.

-Blaise Pascal, Pensee 678

You might expect feminists whose battle-cry is "biology is not destiny!" to reach different conclusions from biologists who are professionally tempted to think just the opposite. Yet both those who drafted the agenda for the Women's Conference in Beijing and the members of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) panel on human embryo research erroneously regard the human embryo as less than human.

For all the surface differences, they share a similar underlying perspective stemming from Descartes' doubt of everything but "I think, therefore I am." Both wrongly assume the human condition to be that of an angel-like conscious mind in a bodily machine. Since the embryo shows no sign of a mind, they falsely conclude that its destruction cannot greatly matter. Whether they think of the mind as a byproduct of the machine or the machine as a fetter on the mind's freedom of choice, the result is the same. Trying to act the angel, they act the beast.

The machinery their minds are trapped in is not biological, but logical. Indeed, the results of biological research must be selected, distorted, and misinterpreted before they can be used to support the NIH panel's contention that what is conceived is only a "pre-embryo"! This is the charge made in a new book by Drs. Kischer and Irving, The Human Development Hoax, and, as a biologist, I find it compelling.

For both the premise and the middle term of the NIH panel's argument are wrong. We are not minds that somehow appear in matter after it is sufficiently organized and equipped with male or female plumbing. We are already male or female from the time ...

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