When is it that I—my body and its various components, that is—stop being me? Or put another way, at what point do I experience de-soulment? Actually, there's no such word, but I didn’t make it up from the whole cloth. Ensoulment—usually spelled without a hyphen—can readily be found in the dictionary. It’s an ecclesi- astical term that describes the entering of the soul into the body, the soul in this view being sent from God as the defining human characteristic, the essence of what makes me, me, and you, you.
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Ensoulment is also a very un-favorite term as far as the Right to Life Movement is concerned, because over the centuries religious authorities have placed ensoulment at a range of times during pregnancy. These have included quickening (e.g. when the baby is felt to move independently of the mother) to more arbitrary markers such as one hundred days of gestation, or as late as partition (e.g. birth). Only rarely has the moment of conception been hypothesized as the moment of ensoulment, which means that the very early stage fetus would be only proto-human, and not yet a fully human entity.
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Renowned thinkers such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas have weighed in on this question without reaching back as far as conception. Also, among bio-ethicists a leading idea has been that the emergence of consciousness might represent a science-based moment of ensoulment, although mention of the soul as such doesn’t figure in.
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But the emergence of consciousness can’t be detected all that precisely, so a working proxy is brain-stem life, which is detectable. The Right to Life Movement hates this line of reasoning too, because ninety to one hundred days gestation is about when brain-stem life can be verified. For purposes of this blog, let’s simply note that the first trimester standard for legal abortion in the US, which has been law for close to half a century now, is right in the mainstream of this thinking, then move on to my real topic, de-soulment.
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What I'm suggesting is that a symmetry exists at the end and the beginning of life. In the concept of ensoulment we have a proto-human cellular entity being animated with a soul at some later time and thereby becoming fully human. Similarly, at death, typically defined as brain-stem death for clinical purposes, one’s residually human and still cellularly alive organs can be harvested for medical use in some other person. So de-soulment would coincide with death, though in some religious traditions this is thought to happen just prior to death, with the soul hovering nearby in a bardo state until the body expires.
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True, neither the soul nor its apocryphal 21 gram (0.75 oz.) weight have any basis in science. With no religious connotation intended, I employ it here purely as shorthand for the ultimate essence of a living human. Yet my symmetry idea will nonetheless draw howls of protest. How could anyone equate a developing, first-trimester fetus, which is day-by-day becoming a human being, with harvested organs that will never develop into anything beyond what they already are?
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Simple. Cloning. Legality aside, with massive medical inter- vention, it would apparently be possible to use harvested tissue to create a whole new me. It’s freakish, and I'm doubious that such a clone, even with a complete transfer of brain content, could conceivably be me. Or not on the soul level posited above. But who can say? It would clearly be very me-like. And in terms of massive medical intervention, how different is this from the extremely exotic petri dish it would take to grow an early stage fetus into a baby were its mother to die while pregnant?
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So I do see a symmetry. We are brought into the world by acts on the part of our biological parents: acts of love, or of lust, or of simple heedlessness. And also by the act of our mother’s not ending her pregnancy, which women who don’t want a child have done in various ways throughout human history. Then, becoming somewhere along the line fully human, we are born, and until the age of our legal majority, our families function as regents, with a legal duty to nurture and safeguard us.
.
After that, we are each in the driver’s seat, and have broad legal control over our destinies. Except at the very end. Brought into the world by the acts of others, sometimes taken from it by the acts of others who do us harm, and reliant on others when we become frail or infirm, it is nonetheless illegal to receive help in ensuring that we die a dignified death. Well, in Oregon we can, but nowhere else in the US right now. Instead, if desperate enough, we must turn our hands against ourselves with whatever weapon we can manage.
.
And finally, following death, no matter how it has come, is the stage of de-soulment, during which our tissues and organs remain sufficiently alive to be put to other uses, assuming we’ve so authorized under the laws of our state. As actual human beings, though, we would by then be gone.
.
Ensoulment is also a very un-favorite term as far as the Right to Life Movement is concerned, because over the centuries religious authorities have placed ensoulment at a range of times during pregnancy. These have included quickening (e.g. when the baby is felt to move independently of the mother) to more arbitrary markers such as one hundred days of gestation, or as late as partition (e.g. birth). Only rarely has the moment of conception been hypothesized as the moment of ensoulment, which means that the very early stage fetus would be only proto-human, and not yet a fully human entity.
.
Renowned thinkers such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas have weighed in on this question without reaching back as far as conception. Also, among bio-ethicists a leading idea has been that the emergence of consciousness might represent a science-based moment of ensoulment, although mention of the soul as such doesn’t figure in.
.
But the emergence of consciousness can’t be detected all that precisely, so a working proxy is brain-stem life, which is detectable. The Right to Life Movement hates this line of reasoning too, because ninety to one hundred days gestation is about when brain-stem life can be verified. For purposes of this blog, let’s simply note that the first trimester standard for legal abortion in the US, which has been law for close to half a century now, is right in the mainstream of this thinking, then move on to my real topic, de-soulment.
.
What I'm suggesting is that a symmetry exists at the end and the beginning of life. In the concept of ensoulment we have a proto-human cellular entity being animated with a soul at some later time and thereby becoming fully human. Similarly, at death, typically defined as brain-stem death for clinical purposes, one’s residually human and still cellularly alive organs can be harvested for medical use in some other person. So de-soulment would coincide with death, though in some religious traditions this is thought to happen just prior to death, with the soul hovering nearby in a bardo state until the body expires.
.
True, neither the soul nor its apocryphal 21 gram (0.75 oz.) weight have any basis in science. With no religious connotation intended, I employ it here purely as shorthand for the ultimate essence of a living human. Yet my symmetry idea will nonetheless draw howls of protest. How could anyone equate a developing, first-trimester fetus, which is day-by-day becoming a human being, with harvested organs that will never develop into anything beyond what they already are?
.
Simple. Cloning. Legality aside, with massive medical inter- vention, it would apparently be possible to use harvested tissue to create a whole new me. It’s freakish, and I'm doubious that such a clone, even with a complete transfer of brain content, could conceivably be me. Or not on the soul level posited above. But who can say? It would clearly be very me-like. And in terms of massive medical intervention, how different is this from the extremely exotic petri dish it would take to grow an early stage fetus into a baby were its mother to die while pregnant?
.
So I do see a symmetry. We are brought into the world by acts on the part of our biological parents: acts of love, or of lust, or of simple heedlessness. And also by the act of our mother’s not ending her pregnancy, which women who don’t want a child have done in various ways throughout human history. Then, becoming somewhere along the line fully human, we are born, and until the age of our legal majority, our families function as regents, with a legal duty to nurture and safeguard us.
.
After that, we are each in the driver’s seat, and have broad legal control over our destinies. Except at the very end. Brought into the world by the acts of others, sometimes taken from it by the acts of others who do us harm, and reliant on others when we become frail or infirm, it is nonetheless illegal to receive help in ensuring that we die a dignified death. Well, in Oregon we can, but nowhere else in the US right now. Instead, if desperate enough, we must turn our hands against ourselves with whatever weapon we can manage.
.
And finally, following death, no matter how it has come, is the stage of de-soulment, during which our tissues and organs remain sufficiently alive to be put to other uses, assuming we’ve so authorized under the laws of our state. As actual human beings, though, we would by then be gone.
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