When does life begin?
Kerry wowed our staff with this submission to our first annual essay contest. After today’s abortion threads at T&S and BCC, I found this only too fitting. Unfortunately, my head is too full of abortion rhetoric to formulate an insightful discussion question. So I’ll simply ask this: What stands out to you as a reader?
2005 Heather Campbell Essay Contest Winner
When Life Begins
It is looking at a British Gravestone, of all things, that makes me think the question.
The gravestone is old and covered with some sort of green fungus. There are many people listed on the stone, though their carved names have been degraded by elemental wrath. They have been dead so long that my question seems completely incongruous, though I know it isn’t.
At what point does life begin?
It’s something I’ve thought about since the day that we found out in vitro fertilization was the only way to have a baby, since the day we flew to London for the cheaper procedure, and since the day they implanted two blastocysts into my uterus. IVF requires the creation of multiple embryos. But not all of them survive. This isn’t due to any sort of deliberate weeding out—if there is any way on earth you can get an embryo to turn into a baby, you do it. If you have to freeze it and use it later, you do it. But between the day of fertilization and implantation, some of your embryos die. It’s almost a biological imperative.
We’ve lost fourteen embryos so far in the process.
I scan the names on the stone to see if any of them are my ancestors, whom we’re here looking for, but the ancestors remain elusive. Beneath lies only an unrelated someone who was once an embryo.
When does life become life and when can you call the loss of it death?
I push my way through grass that hasn’t been mowed in months. I think I can feel insects creeping across my arms and legs as I push through. The sun glares to my left and I am squinting against a massive headache. It is the hottest summer anyone in London can remember, and we are combing the cemetery plot by plot.
I wrote a paper in freshman biology arguing that life began at the moment of conception. I spent a week in research, but no time in actual thought. It was easy to argue what I already believed, easy to leave unasked the difficult questions.
But the truth is, as I scan the names on gravestone after gravestone, I don’t want to have been right. I don’t want life to begin at the moment of conception. Because that means that life is just too full of death. There would be just too much to mourn. Janet Shibley Hyde and John D. DeLamater argue that as many as forty percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage.[1] About half of them occur before the mother even knows she’s pregnant. A perfectly fertile couple can try to have a baby for an entire year unsuccessfully, and who knows how many embryos are lost in the process? I don’t want to stand above the toilet every month and wonder if this is the month I should be mourning the loss of human life. I just don’t.
In God’s way, statistically speaking, it takes several embryos to create one human life. All IVF does is make you aware of what is being lost.
A man with a lawn mower fastidiously mows and re-mows the newer plots at the edge of the cemetery. I want to call him over, tell him that very dead people deserve mowed grass as much as newly dead people. But he moves off, the hum of the mower slowly fading to an insect-like background hum.
I remember what I don’t want to think about: that there are two embryos floating somewhere in my gut. Two blastocysts. A fifty percent chance of conception, they tell me.
2 blastocysts = 0.5 human beings.
But it took sixteen embryos to create those two blastocyts.
16 embryos = 0.5 human beings.
I know that my math is simplistic. Statistics tell you nothing about the particular. They only tell you what is more likely. A single embryo can become two or three human beings. Two embryos can fuse into a single fetus with a double genotype. And fourteen embryos can die and no human beings ever result in the meshing of their cells.
“Hey, I think I found something,” Steve calls out from a few gravestones away. He has taken out the camera and is taking pictures of the inscriptions on the small, rose-colored tomb of an ancestor—James Felix Jones, a sea captain who died toward the end of the nineteenth century.
My sister, Kate, and I make our way over to the grave. I squint, trying to read the dirty inscription on the tomb. I make out only what I already knew: his name, his occupation, the date of his death.
The embryos in my gut have a fifty percent chance of death. Or life.
Of all of the possible odds, I think 50/50 is the worst. There is no comforting yourself—no saying, “it’s more likely this way or that way.” It is equally likely yes. And equally likely no.
Steve is meticulously snapping shot after shot of the grave. And I am baffled by him. We were sent here on this ancestor mission by my Aunt Maurine, the family genealogist. “Why do you care so much about my ancestors?” I grumble at him. I am irritated. Irritated at life, death, my ancestors, the world. My legs are itchy from too-tall grass but because the grass is so wet, scratching only makes my legs sting more. I blame the leftover hormones that still fly around in my blood stream for the bulk of my irritation, but I am probably mostly irritated by the odds: 50/50.
I don’t remember what Steve says back to me. I want it to have been something about life—that life matters. As short as it is and as hard as it is, it matters. I want to believe that more than anything else. But my irritation keeps getting in the way.
It is when we get home to our one-room, overheated, London flat that we get the messages.
The fertility clinic has been trying to call us over and over.
“It’s urgent,” they say. “Please call back.”
We are confused. We were done with the clinic. They told us they wouldn’t be contacting us anymore. We didn’t even bother to keep our phones with us.
“Your embryos,” they say when we finally get ahold of them. “We thought two of them were dead, but they weren’t. They started dividing again. But now it’s too late.”
Too late?
“Too late. They’re too big to be frozen now; they won’t survive.”
Two blastocysts in my gut.
Two blastocysts dying in the lab.
4 blastocysts = 1 human being.
But now it’s too late.
I am crying before I am off the phone with the clinic. The nurse is upset too. “Why didn’t you take your phone with you?” she is asking. “Why didn’t you?”
I was doing genealogy. I was doing the right thing.
I curse the ghosts of my ancestors.
Steve is crying now, too. He holds me and we cry on the bed. I cry and cry and I can’t stop crying.
Kate starts to get frantic. “You’re killing the babies inside you!” she is saying. She is holding a chocolate muffin and smears of chocolate encrust the bottoms of her fingernails. Maybe they even encrust her mind, because she is hysterical.
“STOP! STOP CRYING!” she says.
And I can’t stop.
Steve takes me into our tiny blue bathroom, away from Kate. I sit on the toilet and he sits on the edge of the shower. It is so hot that we turn the shower on cold and let the spray bounce off of the floor and hit us. Steve looks at me, holds my swollen face in one of his hands. We can say nothing to each other. We can just stare. Mourning the fifty percent chance of life now dying in the laboratory. Mourning the fifty percent chance of a family.
Neither of us knows when life begins.
All we know is that something has been lost.
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November 3rd, 2008 at 11:35 pm
The way I see it, life doesn’t begin. It continues. Sperm and eggs have life in them, but on their own they achieve nothing. The creation of a physical body, obviously, begins when a sperm injects itself into an egg. And clearly it is “alive.” The sperm is moving and digging into the egg. It is designed to do that. That is written in its gene.
The real question is when does the spirit of one of God’s children join up with the body. That is a question science hasn’t been able to answer because science hasn’t been able to detect the physical presence of our spirits. D&C teaches us that all things in this universe take up matter, including spirits. That is, a spirit resides in a particular area of space, just like a physical body. How it moves around, we just don’t know. How big it is, we just don’t know. We presume a spirit is the size of a regular human being. When disembodied spirits have visited this earth, they appear as regular sized human beings, just spirit instead of a physical body. But we don’t know how that spirit shrinks itself to enter its newly formed physical body inside the mother.
My own personal guess is that the physical body begins its process in the first trimester without a spirit. The sperm and egg have all the requisite genes to begin the process of the creation of a body. My personal belief is that the spirit enters the body sometime in the second trimester. I have no doubt that the spirit is in the body in the third trimester.
So when does life “begin?” It began with Adam. Since then life continued. There is only one beginning. When does a spirit enter a body thereby creating the new life? I believe it is in the second trimester.
November 4th, 2008 at 8:15 am
Thank you, Dan. Interesting remarks. I agree it’s important to distinguish between life force (the busy little sperm, the dividing blastocyst) and life (spirit plus body). I’d even say there’s a difference between the wiggling sperm and the blastocyst. The sperm holds life force from the man. But once it has combined with the egg, life force from two people is working together to create something new.
I wouldn’t say that new “life” doesn’t matter until the spirit enters. (Not sure what your thoughts are on this.) As the author says of the doomed blastocysts, “something has been lost.” I think it’s more than promise or potential.
That’s what impressed me so about this essay–the author explores that grey area in an insightful, heartbreaking, ultra-personal way.
I found it especially poignant that she was doing family history research when the nurse kept trying to call. The irony of her seeking her ancestors while losing the beginnings of progeny just about kills me.
November 4th, 2008 at 8:41 am
I believe the spirit enters very early. We know our spirits look like our bodies our, DNA tells our body what we will look like. When an embryos is created a unique sequence is formed. Every living things has spirit. I have seen my own babies moving their arms and legs at 9 weeks (babies I went on to lose). Any mother who has seen a beating heart and then silence cannot deny that life and to think it spiritless does not make sense to me. I cannot believe those experiences to be nothing. Some sort of transitional some limbo/quasi life doesn’t make sense to me. A young plant just sprouting is still called a plant- even if it has yet to grow stalks and leaves and blooms?
This all from a woman who has experienced many pregnancy losses and is knows all to well the world of reproductive medicine. Possibly this question is too emotionally laden for me. However from those experiences though, I have come to believe and feel life/spirit is more real and present than the casual way our society deals with it.
November 4th, 2008 at 9:14 am
Kathryn,
Indeed something was lost, but I believe the loss was the potential of a new life. I think that we’ve got to distinguish between our desires for a child and the physical creation of a child. The loss felt in this particular story, in my view, was psychological rather than real. That’s not to diminish the loss felt, because clearly a loss was felt.
My wife and I have a beautiful daughter. A year and a half ago we got her pregnant again, and we were very excited. However, it turned out to be an ectopic pregnancy and it had to be terminated within just a few weeks of inception. Neither of us felt we lost something except for the potential of a new life. I was disappointed that we were not able to get Daniel Jr. then, but we’re okay with it.
November 4th, 2008 at 10:05 am
les,
I respect your point of view, even though I don’t fully share it.
I, too, have seen little hearts beating in early pregnancy, and I can’t accept the idea that these forming bodies hold no significance other than their potential for spirit + body life. But I think there’s a difference between a forming body with a unique genetic sequence, and that same body claimed for eternity by a unique spirit. I think it’s pretty clear the church feels the same way, because abortion is not considered tantamount to murder. But that doesn’t mean the body doesn’t matter. I believe it’s a sacred entity even if the spirit body has not yet entered. It’s a creation of God.
Some women have received personal revelation that the forming bodies they’ve miscarried will be resurrected. I received no such inkling with my miscarriage, but I counted it as a very real loss, and I know God did as well. And Dan, it was more than a psychological loss, although I don’t mean to minimize such loss. It’s not necessarily any easier to bear than any other kind of loss. But something had been growing, and then it stopped growing. I saw the tiny beginnings of the body. It wasn’t only a wish, and idea, a hope, a desire, whatever. It was a forming body, once teeming with life force.
I think it’s important to avoid applying the meaning of our own experiences to the experiences of others, whatever that meaning may be. I think it’s good to share personal convictions, with the understanding that that’s all they are.
That said, Dan, I hope you get your Daniel Jr. soon (if you haven’t already). And les, I’m truly sorry you’ve suffered so much.
November 4th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
I don’t know at what point that is, but I can, in retrospect, tell you that all of my children were present far before their birth. As I look back with the wisdom of perspective, I see that my children have, in many ways, carried personality traits that I noticed in the womb. Quiet children, active children, restless, peaceful. I saw those characteristics earlier than their birth, in every one of my pregnancies.
I can’t however, say at what point they ‘existed’ within me. I don’t think any of us really can. and I don’t necessarily believe there is one magic moment which applies to all. There is a space where we exist in-between — I’ve seen it experienced in dying adults, sickly friends, etc. I’ve often wondered about the idea of permanence of our spirits. I don’t know that they necessarily stay put, for lack of a better way to communicate that sentiment.
November 4th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
Thank you, Kathryn.
Time has helped me evolve in my beliefs, I don’t find they are static. I think that is the reason there is no clear doctrine-there isn’t necessarily one point or one outcome for every loss, I do think it is different in different cases because many women have various revelations or feelings by the spirit. My leanings are just sooner rather than later.
Justine- your word of “permanence” is a good choice. That fits with my feelings. I too have send it at the end of life.
I believe in that sort of “limbo” (to clarify my intention in my earlier post) but not a sort of conceptulaization of it as quasi life where an embryo is somehow viewed as something other than human.
November 4th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
I think that is the reason there is no clear doctrine-there isn’t necessarily one point or one outcome for every loss.
I like how you put this.
If you haven’t already, les (and others), read this post: http://segullah.org/cjane-speaks/the-hourglass-theory/
November 4th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
great link.
When I led pregnancy loss groups this was one of the things I gained, varying perspectives and beliefs. You are very right intepretations, experiences are unique. I think even when we accept our own truth we have to careful of the extent which we apply it. While in the midst of grief I was frustrated by the recalcitrance of people in their positions, their defense of one blanket answer. Especially those who viewed from an “inexperienced” lens.
November 4th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
What a beautiful article. I have not had significant experiences with difficult pregnancies although I have three children. I felt their presence in different ways as I spiritually matured. I don’t think that we can understand this issue because we have such a limited capacity to understand eternity. I think the problem becomes that some people put their own pleasure and convenience above the possibility of life. For them they seek to justify their actions by questioning when life begins. The same question is completely different in the situation described here. I have always thought about the question in terms of stopping abortions, never as a woman who struggles with fertility. Thank you for opening my eyes to the struggle other women face.
November 5th, 2008 at 10:02 am
I remember reading this earlier and think it’s a great example of the kind of Mormon writing that can last. The author of this piece has managed to allow herself to dwell in the difficulty, rather than dismissing it an easy answer. I think this is doing a great service for the rest of us. Because we all find ourselves in the midst of suffering that doesn’t make sense. Too often, I think we feel pressure to pretend like we’re too spiritually solid to mourn. For example, that story in General Conference about the woman who lost her husband in an accident. Whoever gave the talk insisted that she was unflapped by her loss, convinced that her husband was needed on the other side far more than he was needed here.
This essay, however, gives us permission to mourn. There has to be mourning in the world, otherwise, how can we fulfill our baptismal covenant to mourn with those who mourn?
Good for Segullah for getting this out to the world. And good for Kerry Spencer for having the spiritual maturity to not only mourn, but but to present it so poignantly.
November 5th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
Thanks for your comment, Nicole. I agree, Kerry presents this oft-hashed question in a whole new light, and I’m the better for it.
Great remarks, Stephen. I especially loved this:
I think we feel pressure to pretend like we’re too spiritually solid to mourn.
This has been my experience. When my son was born with Down syndrome, I was ashamed of my grief, which made it much much worse. The pressure came from within as well as without.
November 6th, 2008 at 10:19 am
[...] personal essays about the role of conviction in spiritual growth, and the complexities surrounding the question of when life begins. We’ve also had great discussions about the pros and cons of stereotyping LDS publications, [...]
November 13th, 2008 at 9:37 pm
[...] few days ago, we had a very interesting discussion based on a personal essay about one couple’s experience of loss in fertility treatment. We [...]
May 18th, 2010 at 9:21 am
Fertility Clinics really helped a lot in getting my wife to conceive a child. Just make sure you get a reliable one.::*
July 19th, 2010 at 1:25 am
fertility clinics are on the rise these days because people still want to have kids even if they are already old~.;
October 11th, 2010 at 11:30 am
the service charge of fertility clinics is quite high but the results are well worth the price.”
October 22nd, 2010 at 11:19 am
fertility clinics are getting more and more clients these days coz people are getting married at older age,”.
December 12th, 2010 at 11:47 pm
fertility clinics these days are very advanced and of course this can only mean higher success rates on birth `-`
April 25th, 2011 at 12:02 am
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October 16th, 2011 at 4:15 am
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