After three long essays in the New York Times’s “Embryo Question,” the series ends with a stunning confession of complete indecision about what the human embryo is — aside from the assertion that “Their meaning can only ever be contingent.” If it sounds like nothingness, that is the premise.
The first essay in the series serves as an introduction to the question. What is our “obligation” to the embryos, and what is the boundary of scientific research? It convinces the reader, belonging to whichever persuasion, of the other side’s actual investment in the matter. It follows that the second essay pushes into the uncomfortable — or morally reprehensible — topic of genetic screening and optimization through companies such as Orchid. Author Anna Louie Sussman applies experience with video footage of her child’s development as an embryo and, in doing so, pulls away slightly from the free-rein position on embryo use she described throughout.
Still, relativistic abortion activism rules, and Sussman is exploring the idea from that starting point. It’s a given for the Times and comes through mostly in the third essay by typical turns of phrase about “our suffocating abortion debate,” the author’s constant waffling between the “right to privacy” or something of greater magnitude, and even the title, “Are Embryos Property? Human Life? Neither?” But there are points at which the series reads as though Sussman is secretly pro-embryo-rights, which is the crux.
To be clear, she lands on the safe side of not granting “personhood” to human embryos, though she says her research “affirmed my intuition that they’re not merely clumps of cells.” Sussman’s conclusion in all this is that the “embryo question” requires a modified attitude toward the truth: “There need not be consistency across these conversations,” is her explicit recommendation, as “It is their astonishing subjectivity … that makes embryos so eminently capable of teaching us something about our beliefs.”
In other words, there is much to learn — though strictly outside the vein of objective morality. For Sussman, in vitro fertilization’s unregulated, indiscriminate field indicates our system’s unwillingness to “lean into the gray” rather than an imperative to define it and face humanity. The goal of her perspective is not an affirmation of human life but of the supposed first principle of human independence.
Her attitude toward truth comes down to her attitude toward the embryos. The idea that one woman saw that “there was still life in them” is compelling to Sussman. That’s something, but a pitiful something — seeing is believing. Is it too much to think, then, that a more successful live birthrate for IVF would change how human the starting embryos are to people of this persuasion?
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The general arc of technological innovation is advancement on the edge of danger to the fabric of human social life until the technology looks both successful and terrifying. Usually, that is dystopian, and we avoid such endpoints by common sense and regulation. But here, in the “Embryo Question,” the explicit goal forbids that route. It would declare a reality, similar in consequence to the Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos are extrauterine children, that undermines the entire project of sexual liberation. Every liberal social issue leads to that end, and there is no reason to think it would be given up now for the lives of children.
The truth of human life does not govern pro-abortion arguments but flips the objective good to abortion itself. We are seeing the same thing with IVF advocacy, but the method differs: The “astonishing subjectivity” of earlier is the whole premise. To suggest we make no decision or a decision that means nothing is the long game under the guise of earnestness.