Prof. Jérôme Lejeune on Human Ethics and the Unborn Child

On May 7, 1974, less than 500 days after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the disastrous Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide, a world-renowned geneticist testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments in support of a proposed Human Life Amendment. Doctor Jérôme Lejeune had a medical practice in which he treated children with intellectual disabilities; he was also Professor of Fundamental Genetics at the Université René Descartes in Paris and an eloquent advocate for preborn human beings.

Excerpts from Professor Lejeune’s testimony were published by Human Life Review (Winter 1975, pages 105-107) as “Appendix C: Human Genetics and the Unborn Child.” Most of that text is reprinted here with commentary. The English spoken by the expert witness was excellent but sometimes unidiomatic; occasional clarifications are noted in brackets. Lejeune said:

The transmission of life is quite paradoxical. We know with certainty that the link which relates parents to children is at every moment a material link, for we know it is from the encounter of the female cell (the ovum) and the male cell (the spermatozoa), that a new individual will emerge. But we know with the same degree of certitude that no molecule, no individual particle of matter enclosed in the fertilized egg, has the slightest chance of being transmitted to the next generation. Hence, what is really transmitted is not the matter as such, but a specified conformation of the matter, or more precisely, [a kind of] “information.”

The trimester framework of Roe v. Wade was completely arbitrary, with no biological or philosophical foundation whatsoever. Instead, it reflected the approach of the liberal Protestant establishment in the United States at that time: its “Social Gospel” deemphasized the moral law and expanded individual freedom so as to reform and modernize society.¹ For followers of the Social Gospel, the Supreme Court decision seemed like a reasonable attempt to “balance” the rights of the preborn against the interests of the mother and the common good. This weighing of interests, however, presupposes that the smaller the human being, the less human he is and the fewer rights he has.

Lejeune’s initial “paradox” does not engage the trimester scheme but asks the radical question: How does a new human life come to be in the first place? The link to the parents is material but not exclusively so, and therefore there is not “more” of a new human life the more the embryo grows.

In the next paragraph, Lejeune compares “the complex machinery of coded molecules like DNA, RNA proteins, and so on, which are the vehicle of heredity,” with other “processes of reproduction, whether natural or man-made.”

For example, a statue must be built out of some material, and could not exist if [it were] made of pure void. During the casting process, there exists at every moment a contiguity of molecules [i.e. physical contact] between the statue and the cast, and later, between the cast and the replica. But obviously, no matter is reproduced, for the replica could be plaster, or bronze, or anything else. What is indeed reproduced is not the matter of the statue, but the form imprinted in the matter by the genius of the sculptor.

The philosophical distinction between the transmission of form and the transmission of matter rules out crude, materialistic arguments that a fetus is a mere “blob of tissue,” or “part of the woman’s body” or exclusively her possession.

Indeed, the reproduction of living beings is infinitely more delicate than the reproduction of an inanimate form, but the process follows a very similar path, as we will see by another familiar example. On the magnetic tape of a tape recorder, it is possible to inscribe, by minute alterations of local magnetism, a series of signals corresponding, for exmple, to the [performance] of a symphony. Such a tape, if introduced in the appropriate machine, will play the symphony, although there are no musicians in the machine and even no notes written on the tape. That’s the way existence is played. [= That is how a human life plays out.]

A note on audio media for Millennial readers: Vinyl records reproduced sound waves by causing a phonograph needle to vibrate as it traveled along the spiral groove. Magnetic tape recordings were still analog, although in this case the vibrations were recorded as fluctuations of magnetism as a tape uncoiled. In digital audio, discrete packets of information, series of ones and zeros, resemble the genetic code, which is made up of sequences of four bases, adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine (A, C, G, and T) along the double helix.

But, in this analogy, the magnetic tape is incredibly thin, for it is reduced to the size of a DNA molecule, the miniaturization of which is bewildering. To give an idea of this minuteness, we should remember that in this thread every character[istic] of each of us is exactly described. Thou shalt have blond hair, hazel eyes; thou shalt be six feet tall, and thou shalt live some eighty years, if no road accidents intervene! All these instructions, giving a full description of a man, are written in a thread one yard long. But the thread is so thin and so carefully packed inside the nucleus of the cell, that it would stay at ease on the point of a needle.

Here, Dr. Lejeune clinches his unspoken argument that the tiny size of a human being in the earliest stages of development in no way diminishes his or her humanity, identity, or value. He has charmingly guided his sophisticated audience—most of them lawyers—by a scenic route to this conclusion, while staying in his own lane as a geneticist. Yet the good doctor charges a toll: he personalizes DNA (“every characteristic of each of us”), notes that it is not only informative but also purposeful, and describes the “instructions” of the genetic code in biblical language, as commandments. He thereby subtly introduces the notion of a Lawgiver and the moral law as a reasonable conclusion that follows from the findings of the science of genetics.

… The fertilized egg is comparable to a tape recorder loaded. As soon as the mechanism is triggered, the human work is lived [i.e. the musical composition “This Human Being” is performed], in strict conformity to its program.

The very fact that we have to develop ourselves during nine months inside the bodily protection of the mother does not change anything, as you can easily observe by looking at the egg of the hen, from which the chicken will emerge. It makes no difference whether he was incubated by the fowl, or by an electrical heating device! The chicken is still a chicken.

The example of the hen’s egg illustrates the scientific fact that Lejeune often emphasizes in his writings: after conception, no new genetic information is added in subsequent development; the one-celled embryo is a complete and unique individual.

If one day a child can be entirely grown in a test tube, the test tube will never believe that the child is its property! Such a reduction of the human being to its very nature may not be very palatable or intuitively satisfactory, but it accurately reflects the present state of our scientific knowledge. When a new student hears for the first time a symphony, let us say the Little Night Music [Eine kleine Nachtmusik] by Mozart, he must listen to the whole in order to know it. But if he is a music lover, he will recognize Mozart at the first bars, and could tell the title at the second or third bar. It’s the same with the human symphony. The specialist can recognize it at its first accents, even if a greater number of various movements are required so that its general form becomes evident to everyone.

The “reduction” referred to here is the one depicted by Aldous Huxley in his dystopian novel, Brave New World, in which human beings start their lives, not in utero, but in industrial-scale laboratories. The impersonal treatment of a human embryo, though, does not make the individual any less a person than one that is planned and cherished. Lejeune then pivots to another common “reduction” of a human being to its manifest abilities: some people look at a photo of an embryo and say, “it doesn’t look or act like a human being.” Continuing his musical metaphor, he replies that it is doing exactly what a human being does at that early stage of development.

The infinitesimal threads of the genetic information are carefully coiled in little rods, the chromosomes, easily visible with an ordinary microscope. They are something like the magnetic tape insisde the cartridge of a minicassette. Some twenty years ago, nobody could have told [distinguished] the cell of a man from the cell of a chimpanzee. Ten years ago, a simple counting of the chromosomes would have given the answer, 46 if a man, 48 if a chimp. Since last year [1973], if a student looking at a dividing fertilized egg or at the dividing cell of a blastocyst, could not tell them apart saying, “This one is a chimpanzee being, this one is a human being,” he would fail the examination for his license [= degree in fundamental genetics]….

The example demolishes the fanciful nineteenth-century theory, developed on the basis of comparative anatomy, that a human embryo passes through many stages as lower life forms (fish, reptile, ape) before becoming fully human. This theory was taught in textbooks well into the twentieth century! Oddly enough, the trimester framework of the Roe v. Wade decision encourages such unscientific thinking. Lejeune gives his listeners an opportunity to save face by noting the rapid advances in the science of genetics.

These facts of human genetics can appear a little too theoretical, and the question must be asked whether common sense can recognize as such a tiny human being. If very early, only the scientist, aided by refined techniques, can tell. If, let us say, [the observations are made] at two months, everybody knows, and has known for thousands of years.

At two months of age, the human being is less than one thumb’s length from the head to the rump. He would fit neatly into a nutshell, but everything is there—hands, feet, head, organs, bring—all are in place. If you look very closely, you would see the palm creases, and if you were a fortune teller, you could read the good [luck] of that person. Looking still closer with a microscope, you could detect the fingerprints like Sherlock Holmes—every document is available to give him his national identity card! The incredible Tom Thumb really does exist. Not the one of the fairy tale, but the one each of us has been. For it is from this true story that the fairy tales were invented. If Tom Thumb’s adventures have always enchanted the children, if they can still evoke emotion in grown-ups, it is because all the children of the world, all the grown-ups they have turned into, were one day a Tom Thumb in their mother’s womb.

But can we scientists accept these fairy tales? The truth is indeed that Nature itself does. For instance, abortion is a normal process in imperfect mammals called marsupials. They have a special pouch on the abdomen, conveniently accommodated to nurture the little [one, i.e. offspring]. In the giant kangaroo, the abortion occurs at the same stage as the little Tom Thumb in man, and is roughly the same size. The aborted fetus then climbs into the fur of its mother to reach the pouch. The bewildering fact is that the kangaroo mother will let him do so, although she would not allow any other kind of animal to drop in! If the poor brain of a female kangaroo can recognize the tiny creature as a kangaroo being, [it] is no [surprise] that geneticists can safely assure you that Tom Thumb is indeed a true human being.

Professor Lejeune appeals to the imaginations of the legislators on the Senate Subcommittee, in a way that recalls the quip by the English Romantic author Charles Lamb: “Even lawyers were children once!” Rehearing the story of Tom Thumb, as an adult, can awaken a sense of wonder at the beauty of pre-natal development and a feeling of solidarity with the little ones.

In the mid-1970’s, almost 90 percent of physicians in the United States were male. (In France, it was about 85%.) The example of the mama kangaroo is aimed at the elitist paternalism that dominated the medical profession at the time.

From molecular genetics to comparative reproduction, nature has taught us that from its very being [i.e. essentially] the “thing” we started with is a member of our kin. [Because it is] its own, human by its nature, never a tumor, never an amoeba, fish, or quadruped, it is the same human being from fecundation to death. He will develop himself if the surrounding world is not too hostile. And the sole role of medicine is to protect the individual from accidents as much as possible during the long and dangerous road of life.

Decades later, the Swiss philosopher Bernard N. Schumacher observed that “A person in a state of vulnerability teaches us that the essential thing in a human life resides not solely in the dimension of utility and performance, but also in the attitude of trusting dependence on others.”²

Endnotes: