Rocks, Rabbits, and Randalls in Alabama
Thinking clearly about the Alabama Supreme Court decision and what it means for Practical Bioethics
There’s a lot of different moral status’ going on in this AI image
The controversy over Alabama’s IVF is a great way to introduce chapter 9 of Practical Bioethics. It highlights the difficulty drawing the line on moral status. Most of the memes and Late-Night monologues are evidence that people don’t really know what the ruling was about.
No one is saying every egg counts as a person. Only embryos, that is fertilized eggs. Information is expensive and there is little to no incentive to get this right. Only bioethicists and legal nerds are going to wade through the ruling and the Alabama legislature did its job and quickly changed the law the the Court was just interpreting in Lepage v. Center for Reproductive Health.
The 8-1 decision said that according to their reading of Alabama law—The Wrongful Death of a Minor Act—the embryos that result from an IVF procedure are children for the purposes of the Wrongful Death Act and the Lepage’s could sue the clinic for Wrongful Death due to negligent security procedures.
Here’s the description: The LePage’s went through invitro fertilization process that resulted in more embryos than those implanted. IVF often results in more embryos than those implanted. Often these embryos are frozen for future implantation as they were here. A patient from the hospital where the clinic is housed, broke in and removed the Lepage’s embryos on a tray and dropped them when the freezing liquid got on their hands. At issue, could the Lepage’s sue the clinic for wrongful death under Alabama’s definition?
Alabama already had law that said that a fetus in utero was a person for the purposes of wrongful death. The Lepage decision extended this definition to include in vitro embryos.
This meant IVF clinics could be held liable if negligent in handling embryos frozen or otherwise. Almost immediately Alabama’s largest IVF providers ceased their services. The pressure mounted. Too many people in Alabama conceived via IVF. On March 6th, the governor of Alabama signed a bill that would give both criminal and civil immunity to IVF clinics and IVF procedures resumed.
The court ruling of course, was about the legal status of a person, and bioethics is about the moral status of a person. In chapter 9, I define moral status by looking at the difference between rocks, robots, rabbits and Randall:
Moral status indicates what is ethically permitted. Rocks have no moral status. A robot you buy from Walmart does not either. But human beings named Randall or Rene do have moral status. I should not be able to own people named Randall. But the sixty-four-million-dollar philosophical question is why? (p.385)
In this debate, drawing the line between rocks and robots, and Randalls is an exercise in moral reasoning (the Discern in the 5 Ds). Where do embryos fit in? If embryos aren’t persons then when do they become persons? Most proponents of life beginning at conception make the case that there is a very real and bright difference between a sperm or an egg and a when those two become an embryo. Literally there is a spark caused by a flooding of zinc at conception
But opponents will object that there are reasons to think embryos are different than babies or even fetuses.
Fetuses and babies can’t be frozen like peas and thawed out. Embryos can. Perhaps more significantly, fetuses and babies feel pain. Embryos don’t. Ask yourself (and your students) can someone be “harmed” if they can’t feel pain? Can they be wronged? What is the difference between “harming” and “wronging?”
What are the moral implications of wronging someone without harming them? If embryos can’t feel pain, can they be harmed? wronged? Joel Feinberg argued that harming is not always about pain. To set back someone’s vital interests wrongfully is a harm. That definition has some problems. J.S. Mill defined harm as something like the violation of a clear and assignable duty to another.1
Even if all embryos are persons, this might not settle what are duties to them are. Check out the debate between Judith Jarvis Thomson and Frank Beckwith about duties to bring the unborn to term in the readings on Chapter 9.
For an exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) discussion of this, see Joel Feinberg’s four volume series on harm—especially the volume on “Harmless Wrongdoing.”