"human beings always have radical capacities that animals of other kinds never have. It is a sober truth—more and more intelligible as our knowledge of genetic complexity and the nanophysics of DNA expands—that the one-cell human embryo has, right then and there, radical capacities, to think, talk, and laugh, which a frog embryo simply lacks. And these radical capacities are the rational foundation of human equality. Their possession by every member of our species, from conception until death, justifies communities in undertaking the burdens of envisaging and securing equal protection of law, and in setting out on the course of acknowledging rights of persons. . . .
". . . the fact of the matter is as stated frankly by Robert G. Edwards, the first person to bring a human person from conception in a Petri dish to birth from her mother’s womb. Work on in vitro fertilization, into which ethical considerations 'hardly entered,' enabled him, he wrote, to 'examine a microscopic human being—one in its very earliest stages of development.' At its one-, two- and four-cell stages, 'the embryo is passing through a critical period in its life of great exploration: it becomes magnificently organized, switching on its own biochemistry,' increasing 'in size, and preparing itself quickly for implantation in the womb.'
"Acknowledging that a human being is sexed radically—that is, from its very beginning—Edwards said about his first 'test-tube baby,' Louise Brown, 'She was beautiful then [as one or two cells], and she is beautiful now.' That appreciation of beauty went beyond the facts of the matter, but knowingly presupposed a totally informed grasp of the facts of the matter: about the dynamic, self-directing unity and integrity of Louise’s being, at every stage from her beginning, and about her personal membership of humankind from that earliest time of her life.
"The words of the profoundly secular Dr. Edwards, like the more highly articulated syntheses of developmental-biological information with philosophical precision such as one finds in Robert George and Christopher Tollefsen’s Embryo (2008), all reinforce the already inevitable conclusion: Justice Stevens was simply mistaken in claiming—as he repeatedly did, most elaborately in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services—that the question of when human life (or personhood) begins is theological and/or religious, a question that there can be no secular purpose in resolving.
"Difficult or easy, that question, like its answer, is in truth strictly factual. Not in the same sense as history is factual, but in the equally secular sense in which natural science and philosophical assessments of natural-scientific findings are factual. It is like the judgment that we are animals that can make free choices, in which nothing determines which of two or more options will be chosen other than the choosing itself; or the judgment that reasons for judgment are not reducible to very complex physical interactions and causalities; or the judgment that an original singularity ('Big Bang'), billions of years ago, better explains the data than alternative histories of the universe. One is making a strictly secular judgment when one concludes that not only the one-cell, but equally the two-cell and four-cell human embryo—and equally the embryo at all later stages (including in a special, complex way, the relatively rare cases of monozygotic twinning, and excluding the also relatively rare cases of hydatidiform moles and other products of human conception that lack the epigenetic primordia for development of human capacities)—exists, functions, and develops as a unified, self-directed whole of a particular (human!) kind and never as a mere collection of contiguous but unintegrated individual cells. Equally secular and equally available is the rational conclusion that each adult, child, infant, and unborn child had his or her personal beginning precisely as a one- and then two- and then four-celled embryo with just those radical capacities which, by their species-specific diversities, both distinguish him or her from every other human person and unite all these human persons, all of us, in basic equality of humanity.
"Our understanding (and accurate critical assessment) of the amazing way in which species-specific information ('form') dominates the astounding storm of partially random nano-level molecular and sub-molecular events is knowledge that is, if anything, more a cause (or potential cause) of moving toward 'theological' or 'religious' hypotheses and judgments than it is a result or manifestation of theology or religion. Justice Stevens had things backward, and his Webster claim is no rational or constitutional barrier to revisiting and rejecting the Roe denial of personhood before birth." John Finnis, "Abortion is unconstitutional," First things no. 312 (April 2021): 37-38 (29-38).
