The latest Mere Fidelity podcast has gone online. This week, Matt Lee Anderson, Derek Rishmawy, and I are discussing chapter 4 of Oliver O’Donovan’s Begotten Or Made?, which focuses on embryo research, and the question of who is a person. We begin with the following quotation:

The embryo is of interest to us because it is human; it is ‘ourselves’. On the other hand, it is considered a suitable object of experiment because it is not like us in every important way. It has no ‘personality’. It is us and not us. In those two assertions we see the movement of self-transcendence taking shape. The embryo is humanity in a form that is especially open to our pinning it down as scientific object and distancing ourselves from it in transcendent knowledge…

It is enough to point out that the ambiguity of the status of the embryo research subject is precisely what is intended. It is what the task of self-transcendence needs, that it should be ourselves and yet not ourselves. If we should wish to charge our own generation with crimes against humanity because of the practice of this experimental research, I would suggest that the crime should not be the old-fashioned crime of killing babies, but the new and subtle crime of making babies to be ambiguously human, of presenting to us members of our own species who are doubtfully proper objects of compassion and love.

I found this week’s discussion particularly thought-provoking and challenging. Take a listen here.

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