By declaring that a couple could sue a hospital for wrongful death for accidentally destroying their frozen embryos, the Alabama Supreme Court defined an embryo as a child — a person who can die. This goes farther than a fetal personhood, since a fetus is an embryo that has managed to be implanted itself in the uterus, and has undergone seven weeks of development. Anything before then, it’s an embryo. However, the Alabama ruling means that a frozen embryo, which means an egg that’s been fertilized by sperm but not yet successfully implanted in the uterus can still be considered a human person. In short, this ruling cements into case law what the proponents of “Life Begins at Conception” have been proclaiming.
This ruling, on top of the Supreme Court overturning Roe Vs. Wade in 2022, represents a huge swing of the pendulum on the subject of abortion that couldn’t have been imagined in 1973 when the judgment was first handed down, enshrining women’s right to abortion as an inferred right in the constitution. Even then, the justices struck a compromise between the mother’s right to abortion and the fetus’ right to life by dividing the pregnancy into a trimester that acted as a sliding scale in which the mother’s right slowly gave way to the fetus’s right as the pregnancy matured.
While this judgment was based on the medical definition of when a fetus could survive outside the womb, the lead up to the judgment was also marked by increasing social awareness of the dangers and unfairness of making abortion illegal. Legal judgments are also a product of the society in which they are formulated. Roe vs. Wade wasn’t an exception. Throughout the late '60s, proponents of abortion brought into the larger social awareness the gruesome photos of young girls who had perished as they lay while attempting self-abortion using a wire coat hanger. In fact, the coat hanger became a powerful and visual symbol for the pro-abortion movement.
Another argument for abortion was the fairness argument. Daughters of the privileged class could fly to countries where abortion was legal. They could terminate their pregnancy under modern medical care in confidence without negative consequences for their societal status. On the other hand, girls without the same means, had no choice but to go through with a pregnancy, thereby condemning their future to a certain inevitability, or subject themselves to back-alley abortions outside the bounds of standard health care.
Since then, the social pendulum in the U.S. has swung, giving rise to the pro-life position that basically says that a bunch of zygotes, outside the uterus, are persons. Ironically, this ruling caused IVF to cease in Alabama and put many parents who want children in limbo. Folks are scrambling with the unintended consequences of this decision, with state politicians passing a law that indemnifies the medical personnel who provide IVF services. However, this law creates even more contradiction; if you take this to its logical conclusion, Alabama just passed a law that says it’s ok to kill certain types of “persons” under specific circumstances without these “persons” having done anything to deserve death. In fact, they are as innocent as anyone can possibly be.
I am not making light of this situation. I just want to point out that this isn’t an easy question to answer, especially if you’re looking for a simple answer. “Life Begins at Conception” is a simple position, attractive precisely because of its simplicity. However, it runs into a reality in which no one will acknowledge that a fertilized egg invisible to the eye has the same “personhood” as a toddler running around your backyard.
Koreans could assume that such a torturous debate around abortion may seem a peculiarly American phenomenon. After all, Koreans traditionally approached abortion on a more practical basis. Even before Korea’s Supreme Court ruled that illegalizing abortion was unconstitutional, it was widely and openly available, with little moral judgment. However, would that pragmatic, almost cavalier attitude toward abortion still hold as Korea’s birthrate continues with its downward spiral into hitherto unknown territory? We are already hearing voices condemning the low birthrate as unpatriotic behavior. How long before we hear voices decrying abortion as not only unpatriotic but an outright treacherous betrayal of Korean ethnicity? How loud would these voices get when Korea experiences more multiethnic births than homogeneous Korean births? What happens when those multiethnic births are from Southeast Asian women? How does Korea’s vaunted preference toward "ethnic purity" deal with the impending and demographically inevitable shift in what it means to be Korean?
As I said, legal judgments are not free from the society that surrounds them. This debate about embryonic personhood taking place in Alabama isn’t just a house fire that’s happening across the river, as the Korean adage says. It’s a wildfire that will inevitably spark even deeper soul-searching in Korea when the time comes, which is sooner than you think.
Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect The Korea Times’ editorial stance.
Embryonic personhood in Korea
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21.03.2024
By declaring that a couple could sue a hospital for wrongful death for accidentally destroying their frozen embryos, the Alabama Supreme Court defined an embryo as a child — a person who can die. This goes farther than a fetal personhood, since a fetus is an embryo that has managed to be implanted itself in the uterus, and has undergone seven weeks of development. Anything before then, it’s an embryo. However, the Alabama ruling means that a frozen embryo, which means an egg that’s been fertilized by sperm but not yet successfully implanted in the uterus can still be considered a human person. In short, this ruling cements into case law what the proponents of “Life Begins at Conception” have been proclaiming.
This ruling, on top of the Supreme Court overturning Roe Vs. Wade in 2022, represents a huge swing of the pendulum on the subject of abortion that couldn’t have been imagined in 1973 when the judgment was first handed down, enshrining women’s right to abortion as an inferred right in the constitution. Even then, the justices struck a compromise between the mother’s right to abortion and the fetus’ right to life by dividing the pregnancy into a trimester that acted as a sliding scale in which the mother’s right slowly gave way to the fetus’s right as the pregnancy matured.
While this judgment was based on........
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