Elise's Analysis of "When Life Begins"

Elise Petersen
Dr. Kerry Spencer
Writing 150H
10/17/2011
One Half of a Human Being

Sixteen embryos.

Two blastocysts.

One half of a human being—if you’re lucky.

In its spring 2006 issue, Segullah Journal featured an essay entitled, “When Life Begins.” Written for an audience of LDS women, the piece relates Dr. Kerry Spencer’s personal struggle with infertility and thoughts about life.

In the essay, Spencer contemplates the point at which human life begins. Two displays of kairos produce bold, compelling appeals to readers’ pathos, and subtler lacing of antithesis, juxtaposition, and epistrophe throughout the text gives plain words profound meaning.
In the beginning of her essay, Spencer writes, “At what point does life begin?” We read her question for the first time, and it seems harmless—even lighthearted—until we read, “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” (190). She tosses us a stick of dynamite, and we don’t realize it until it’s in our hands. In a moment of recognition—a moment of kairos—we see that when she asks, “When does life begin?” she is not introducing a scientific treatise or an opinion piece. She is beginning a heavy personal narrative.

She proceeds to recount a personal experience with in vitro fertilization, blended with her thoughts about life in general. She waits until the end to surprise us again: “It is when we get home to our one-room, overheated, London flat that we get the messages,” she writes. “The fertility clinic has been trying to call us over and over... ‘Your embryos,’ they say... ‘We thought they were dead, but they weren’t...But now it’s too late” (192). With the use of kairos, Spencer does more than recount her shocked, heartbroken reaction. She sets her reader up to feel shocked and heartbroken, too.

After we experience her kairos for the first time—after realizing the personal relevance of her essay and sampling its emotional appeals—subsequent readings reveal deeper devices and deeper thoughts.
Spencer asks, as she is still introducing her topic, “When does life become life, and when can you call the loss of it death?” (190). One of many antitheses in the piece, the question places “life” and “death” in such proximity to one another that we are prompted to consider them at the same time, in relation to each other. Like white against black, life seems especially valuable when cast against death.

She continues her thoughts, and later employs another antithetic sentence carrying a similar effect: “In God’s way,” she writes, “it takes several embryos to create one human life. All [in vitro fertilization] does is make you aware of what is being lost” (191). Spencer’s casting of God against medical procedure connotes the latter with cold artificiality—a connotation which readers might not consider given different context. Her opposing diction choices provoke thought: “create” and “life” draw an especially emotional response to the word “lost.”

Spencer builds a parallel effect with juxtaposition. Unlike antithesis, though, which manifests its impact in individual sentences, her juxtaposition characterizes the work as a whole. Setting her narrative in an English graveyard, she spends the entire essay bouncing her focus between a search for family headstones and an unfolding of her IVF experience.

Discussing the dissimilar topics as one synthesized flow of ideas allows her to convey deep meanings without delving into great detail. She writes, “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” (190). Whereas the loss of an embryo can sometimes seem an abstract, scientific concept, the cemetery setting helps Spencer convey the message that a lost embryo is a lost life.

Results of the juxtaposition are fourfold: The value of life becomes a powerful concept as she considers both the deceased and the unborn. Spencer’s introducing of her ancestors as she simultaneously considers her own unborn children brings the concept of family—an entity undoubtedly valued by her female, Latter-day Saint audience—into central focus. In between the lines, she urges us to wonder why some are allowed to live long, full lives, while others live barely beyond conception. And, finally, she stirs our sense of pathos: to think of a lost embryo as a lost human being is a radically different emotional experience than the simple dismissal of a lost embryo as a petri dish fluke.
Points delivered throughout the essay are reinforced and stamped into our memories via Spencer’s use of epistrophe. She writes, “...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” (190, Emphasis added). In this manner, she repeats key phrases at the ends of several sentences, writing them in an ink transcendent of the physical page: we remember them.

Her most poignant use of epistrophe reveals a fundamental thesis. Speaking of her husband, Steve, and remembering something he says to her in the cemetery, she writes, “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” (191). Here is the backbone of her essay, for without such a conviction—that life matters—Spencer’s ponderings would be meaningless. Her use of epistrophe draws attention to that key phrase and helps her deliver and emphasize it.

Her four devices carry thoughts from author to reader with great impact: kairos appeal to pathos and challenge our emotions. Juxtaposition and antithesis guide her reader’s focus and give her words depth. Epistrophe gives her points lasting impact.
She tugs at our emotions. As we surrender them, we come to feel her hopes, her irritations, her pains—and gain a better understanding of the human condition overall.
Thirty-two embryos and four blastocysts—according to science—equal one human being.

One human being—according to the human condition—can only be as whole as its capacity to internalize works like Spencer’s; works with something to say and with something to teach.

When does life begin?

Why does it matter?

Because life matters.



Works Cited
Spencer, Kerry. “When Life Begins.” Readings for Intensive Writers. 5th ed. Comp. Susan Jorgensen. Provo: BYU Academic Publishing, 2007. 190-192. Print.