When does life of a new individual begins ?
More and more often, and with ever greater insistence, one hears the invocation of the "right to life" by Catholic movements that consider human existence to be something sacred and inviolable and therefore it is legitimate to ask ourselves: "When does life begin?" The answer is simple and surprising at the same time: "Never!" In fact, life began only once about three and a half billion years ago and since then the conditions for the phenomenon to repeat itself have not been fulfilled: life itself has destroyed the conditions necessary for its origin. We can therefore say that through reproduction life does not begin: it is simply transmitted from one individual to other individuals.
Perhaps then it is more correct to ask another question: "When does the life of a new individual begin?" In this case the biologist would reply that, if the reproduction is of the sexual type, a new individual is born at the very moment in which the male gamete (sperm) penetrates into the female one (egg or ovum) forming a cell with double chromosomal content (i.e. with complete DNA), called zygote. This first cell will subsequently divide producing many billions of cells that will make up the adult body. Almost all of these new cells are similar to the first, that is, diploid; Gametes, on the other hand, are not, ie the cells responsible for reproduction which are haploid and therefore contain half of the chromosomes present in all the others. For science there are therefore no doubts. But the real problem, as we will clarify later, is not to establish when the life of any individual begins, but to decide when an individual takes the human characteristics.
Why is it so important and urgent to establish the exact moment when a man's life begins? Everything arises as a result of the practice (which is becoming more and more widespread) of the so-called "assisted procreation", a technique aimed at favoring human reproduction which, however, creates the ethical and legal problem of the conservation and manipulation of embryos.
1. ASSISTED REPRODUCTION
In a society in which the need for "naturalness" is being invoked with increasing frequency, we do not realize that in the life of each one of us there is absolutely nothing natural. Hospitals, cars, medicines, electric light and a thousand other goods that are available especially to citizens living in industrialized countries, are not natural products. And today not even the reproductive process is more natural: on the one hand there are contraceptive practices, which allow to separate sexuality from reproduction, and on the other hand, there are new reproductive techniques, which make reproduction possible without sexuality.
In modern society, the desire to have a child immediately after marriage is less and less common among young couples. The age of procreation therefore tends to move forward in time, preferring many young people (especially if they are female) to devote their energies to work and career, to consolidate the economic situation, in search of a comfortable and best home. use of free time.
However, it often happens that when the spouses who are no longer young finally decide to give birth to a child, they realize, not without surprise, that this does not happen with the ease imagined previously and then two opposing feelings arise. On the one hand the anguish, the feelings of guilt and depression and on the other the discovery that even without children one can live happily. A married couple who is convinced that they cannot have children and who does not make a drama of it learns that there are many other couples in the same situation for many years while living their lives peacefully. They also learn of a long series of surveys conducted around the world that show how childless couples age better than prolific ones, have more lively social, work and personal relationships,
In many couples, however, the condition of infertility causes anxiety, frustration, maladjustment: a situation further amplified by a still very strong social pressure towards young spouses. Although births are falling, couples who marry and have at least one child are expected to last longer, because the presence of the children is believed to keep the bond together and ensure the stability of the marriage. The widespread belief that a family is such only if there are children therefore creates in some the serious problem of infertility. It is therefore necessary to understand what are the reasons why some couples are unable to have children.
The causes can be varied and depend on the woman, the man or both. In a not too distant time, the woman was held solely responsible for infertility and therefore it was always she who was subjected to tests and therapies. Today, however, we speak of an "infertile couple" because the reproductive systems of the male and female must work correctly and in unison to be able to procreate. For example, it is not enough that one of the two has already had a child to escape the investigation.
The increase in sterility, or rather infertility (because the former is a very rare condition) is a problem that affects the western world above all and one of the most obvious causes is the increase in the average age in which one seeks the first son. The woman reaches the maximum of fertility around the age of 25, age beyond which a physiological reduction of the reproductive system begins which is completely canceled with the menopause. For the man, things are different as he never reaches a complete cessation of fertility, but also for the male after the age of 50 the chances of procreation are very low.
Other causes of infertility include the increase in both male and female genital infections and the worsening of seminal fluid caused by environmental pollution (estrogens used in animal husbandry, pesticides, exhaust gases) and the use of drugs, coffee, alcohol and smoking. Female infertility in particular can be caused by abortions or by the prolonged use of contraceptives and finally also by stress. The signals that provoke the release of the egg cell from the ovary depart from the brain and consequently a nervous stress can alter a physiological mechanism that is already very delicate in itself.
Psychological factors should not be overlooked either: it is not uncommon for a couple who, after years of waiting and after having been subjected to various therapies in specialized infertility centers, decide to adopt a child: it often happens that as soon as they have had the child up for adoption the woman becomes pregnant.
When you have traveled all the ways, so let's say "natural", to have a child all that remains is the use of "artificial procreation".
There are various techniques of artificial (or assisted) procreation from the simplest and most banal to the most incredible strategies, so much so that in today's reality no natural act is considered strictly necessary to have a child because this can be conceived in the laboratory. In more explicit terms, today it is no longer essential for the male through the sexual act to deposit his seminal fluid in the woman's vagina to give birth to a child as this operation can be done artificially by injecting the sperm at the moment of ovulation through a cannula directly near the woman's cervix.
But much more and better can be done. Today, male gametes and above all female gametes can be taken out of the human body and thus favored their meeting in vitro or, as they say in journalistic terms, “in test tube”, and then transfer the newly formed embryo into the woman's uterus. It is also possible to store sperm from a donor in containers called "sperm banks" at a constant temperature of 196 degrees below zero thanks to the use of liquid nitrogen. This technique would allow man to procreate even when his fertility were to fail due to some irreversible medical or surgical treatment and even in the event of death. It actually happened that a French woman was inseminated with the sperm of her deceased husband and therefore gave birth to a child who, when he grew up, learned that he had lost his father a few years before his birth.
Today, paradoxically, it is possible, thanks to donations, that two people can have a child without ever having seen each other. The woman unable to ovulate can in fact resort to eggs from a donor or a woman able to ovulate but without a uterus or with a malformed uterus can have her own eggs fertilized in vitro (even from sperm from an unknown donor) and then transfer the embryo in the uterus of a woman carrying the pregnancy to term. In this case, the born child would be biologically the son of the people who provided the gametes but would have developed in the uterus of a “nurse”.
2. THE USE OF EMBRYOS
In Italy, on Tuesday 10 February 2004, after a long parliamentary process, the law regulating medically assisted procreation was definitively passed. Within that same law, the age-old question aimed at defining the status of the embryo has also been resolved: that is, whether in all respects it should be considered a human person, with the ensuing rights, first of all that to life.
There is no doubt that human life must be more worthy of respect and rights than that of any other living being, such as a bacterium that can be destroyed with an antibiotic or an annoying mosquito, which can be crushed mercilessly against the wall. The problem is to establish when an embryo takes the human characteristics. For believers, the human person is a living being in possession of the soul which would be given by God at the very moment of conception: therefore from the point of view of the Church the zygote would already have the dignity of a human person. However, not all, not even among Catholics, agree in fixing the beginning of human life at the moment immediately following the fertilization of the ovum.
For example, for St. Thomas the soul would be introduced into the body of the unborn child a few months after the woman was fertilized: before that moment - he argued - matter is not formed enough to receive the soul. However, there are also intermediate opinions on this subject, so for example, according to some exponents of the Catholic world, the embryo becomes a human being at the moment of its implantation, that is when by attaching itself to the wall of the uterine cavity it acquires the real possibility of developing and generating a new life. A possibility the latter that before that event is only theoretical. If this proposal were accepted, abortion should not be allowed while assisted fertilization would be lawful, which also provides for the freezing of embryos (or cryopreservation, from the Greek term crýos = cold, frost) and their use for research.
For the western philosophical tradition a person is a being endowed with self-awareness, reason and feeling capable of making free choices in a responsible way. On the basis of this definition, there would be many subjects lacking the characteristics of a human person mentioned above, however this does not mean that all those who do not fall within the definition should be suppressed. However, the acceptance of such a definition would imply that the embryo is not a person as, for example, lamb or chicken is not and therefore it should not even have the rights reserved for people. Now - the laity point out - precisely because we do not have absolute truths and dogmas we avoid, for example, practicing abortion on a fetus at the last stage of pregnancy,
The new law, which fully accepts the proposals of the fundamentalist Catholics, was judged cruel and unjust by the parties of the left and more generally by the laity (in truth also by some parliamentarians of the Catholic area who nevertheless voted for it) who highlighted that it does not respect the different ethical, cultural and religious orientations present in the multiethnic and multiracial society which by now has become ours and they also considered that the same constitutional principles guaranteed by a state that defines itself as secular and pluralist are disregarded. So let's see what are the most significant aspects of this new law.
First of all, it allows the use of assisted procreation only when it is ascertained the impossibility, certified by a doctor, to therapeutically remove the causes of sterility and infertility. Therefore, the legislation establishes that only couples of different sexes, married or cohabiting but of a potentially fertile age and both living can be admitted to the treatment; consequently singles, grandmothers, mothers, gay couples and post-mortem fertilization are not foreseen. The new law also prohibits the conservation of embryos and requires that once fertilized the egg must be implanted within seven days and there can be no second thoughts on the part of the woman.
Following this last injunction, however, it is not indicated how to proceed to force the woman who does not want him to have the fertilized egg implanted. In truth, precisely because of the dissent raised around this article of the law, an agenda has been attached to it which commits the Government, when it will have to issue the guidelines relating to its application, to make it clear that in case of revocation of the there is no coercive obligation to implant the fertilized egg.
In addition to all the other prohibitions, the law does not even admit heterologous fertilization, that is, the possibility of resorting to a donor outside the couple, even in cases where there is no other possibility to remedy the sterility. Regarding this limitation based on an ethical principle even before legal, the feminist movement asks (paradoxically) the censors of the law why it should be more moral for a woman who wants a child, that her legitimate husband is not able to give her, go to bed with that of her best friend, rather than having the sperm donate from a stranger.
Finally, the law to avoid the production of surplus fruits of conception limits the creation of embryos to the bare essentials for a single and simultaneous implantation and establishes that their number in any case must not exceed three. This further restriction coupled with the foreclosure of the use of heterologous fertilization effectively condemns many women to repeatedly resort to stressful, and dangerous to health, ovarian stimulation in an attempt to create new embryos. All this will favor, for those who can afford it, procreative tourism in other countries where there is a less restrictive law.
For the parliamentarians of christian conviction who, across the political spectrum, voted for the new law it was a victory of the "natural" conception of life within the couple, while for the feminist and secular movement that of the vote was a day of mourning that brought Italy back a quarter of a century, also because they fear that the new law could give rise to the modification of 194 on the voluntary interruption of pregnancy (better known as the law on abortion).
In reality, the law on assisted procreation strongly protects the unborn child while the woman is more sacrificed. Given that the embryo is to be considered an unborn child having very little chance of completing its maturation while the woman is certainly a living being. In fact, there are few chances for an embryo to implant and many to abort (already in normal conditions, spontaneous abortions, those of which often not even the woman is aware, represent 40% of fertilized eggs) so currently the success rate of the interventions (usually after numerous attempts) is not more than 25%, but later this value is destined to decrease.
The law also includes a long series of severe administrative, civil and criminal penalties for offenders. The fines will range from 100.000 to one million euros and imprisonment from 10 to 20 years if experimentation on embryos and cloning are practiced; in the most serious cases, the doctor is also banned from exercising his profession perpetually.
3. A LAW AGAINST RESEARCH
In addition to limiting procreation, the law prohibits, and this from the point of view of science is the most serious thing, experimentation on the embryo and cloning. By prohibiting the production of human embryos and their conservation, the law places unjustified limits on medical and scientific research, since it precludes the possibility of new discoveries that could improve the lives of many sick people and perhaps even heal them.
Once the law is approved, the problem remains of what to do with the thousands of frozen embryos that are filled with the refrigerators of the infertility clinics and that not even the laymen would feel like throwing in the garbage. One solution could be to assimilate them to subjects in brain death and opt for the donation of their tissues, as happens for organs. A proposal was also formulated to keep them indefinitely at the expense of the taxpayer: a solution that would definitively prevent the search. Therefore, do not complain if our brain drain continues and if the next Nobel Prize winner will once again be an Italian abroad.
When problems are at stakeconcern society as a whole, the ethics that underlie them can only be secular, because only in this case would it be universal, that is, valid for everyone, as is mathematics, for example, which is subtracted from the judgment of God. Not even God is able in fact to define with absolute precision the relationship between circumference and diameter of the circle: where does that 3.14 go… nobody knows, not even the highest intelligence. When, on the other hand, ethics is defined by the different religions, obviously there is more than one and each of them is judged, by the followers of that creed, to be better than the others. Ethics also change over time:
The embryo can be compared to a chestnut with respect to the tree. This simile is not meant to mean that the human embryo corresponds to a chestnut or that the tree is comparable to a man, but simply that a chestnut is to the tree that produces it as an embryo is to the man who has it. produced and from which it derives and like a chestnut it cannot be treated like a chestnut tree, so an embryo cannot be evaluated as if it were an adult man. In fact, no one is scandalized if, for example, chestnuts are roasted on the fire while many people would be indignant if they saw a tree felled (especially if healthy) or worse, a chestnut forest burned, especially if the fire was arson.
And as no one is assailed by guilt while eating roasted chestnuts, the same should happen in experimentation on the embryo: there should be no cause for scandal in using human embryos if the aim were to study and analyze the cells that compose them in order to to find ways to improve the lives of many human beings, while it would be unacceptable to conduct experiments on a man, or worse still to burn him alive, even if in the past this was done and precisely in the name of God.
Einstein was not such when he was still in its embryonic state: he became so at a later time. If it had been experimented on that embryo and in the end it had been killed, the German scientist would not have been born and no one would have known what that embryo could have become as no one knows what the billions of embryos aborted more or less spontaneously over the years could have become. and in past centuries: who knows how many geniuses there might have been among them.
A couple of days after the approval of the Medically Assisted Reproduction Act, news came that a group of South Korean scientists had produced the first true cloned human embryo. This is a historical achievement that could open the door to advanced research to eradicate countless diseases, but at the same time a worrying step has also been taken towards the creation of copies of human beings in the laboratory. The cloned embryos (about twenty that have grown in the test tube to reach the stage where they are usually implanted in the female uterus) were obtained by inserting the nucleus of an adult cell of a woman into an egg cell at which previously the haploid nucleus had been removed.
Our goal - Korean scientists reassure - is to use the cells of cloned embryos to make transplants, not to make babies. Human cloning is in fact considered reproductive when it is aimed at giving rise to the formation of a complete human being while it is considered therapeutic when it is used in the production of embryos from which a colony of stem cells is extracted.
These (from the Latin stamen = stamen, thread, with reference to the germinal and constitutive principle of living organisms) precisely because they are still undifferentiated are totipotent cells, that is, capable of differentiating into all types of adult cells. They therefore allow to replace the diseased cells and for example allow to repair the damage caused by a heart attack or those caused by a degenerative disease. At the beginning, embryonic stem cells are all the same but then they differentiate into cells that form the different organs and systems which make up a living organism: once differentiated, that is specialized, these cells can no longer go back.
Stem cells are also immortal, as are tumor cells which, having lost their natural specialization, continue to divide relentlessly (those called He-La are famous, currently distributed in various scientific laboratories where they reproduce in suitable culture medium). Once specialized, the cells contain a sort of timer that establishes the moment of death: brain cells, for example, last exactly one life because they die together with the individual in which they reside, while red blood cells are cells that live only three. months but are immediately replaced by new ones that form in the bone marrow.
Stem cells are therefore also present in adult organisms (for example in the bone marrow or in the umbilical cord) and could also be used like embryonic ones to carry out experiments, but it seems that the latter have advantages over the former. In this regard, some scientists (actually not many) point out that therapeutic cloning is not the only way to heal many sick people: in reality, degenerative diseases could be treated with alternative therapeutic methods that do not require the use. of stem cells.
Of course, the application of the new discovery to concrete cases will not be immediate. The biologists believe that the practical relapses will not occur before five or ten years, but perhaps we will not have to wait so long; perhaps much sooner this achievement will be delivered to people affected by degenerative diseases such as Alzhaimer, Parkinson's and diabetes. However, the question that we cannot fail to ask ourselves is whether Italian patients will be able to access the treatments produced by the new techniques or will they once again have to go abroad to be treated.
However, in the Korean affair there is also a positive aspect to point out and that is that research cannot be directed, much less stopped: if from one part of the world, perhaps through a law, an attempt is made to hinder scientific progress from another part there are those who carry out those same projects that others consider immoral.
