James Tonkowich
March 10, 2008
Just in time for the 35th annual March for Life, the inherent value and dignity of human life has been dealt another blow.
Scientists at Stemagen, a California-based biotech company, announced that they had not only cloned five humans, but had grown those embryos to the stage of development where they could be transferred into a womb Not that anyone at Stemagen wants to transfer them to a womb
“It’s unethical and it’s illegal, and we hope no one else does it either,” Stemagen chief Dr. Samuel H. Wood told the Washington Post. What Stemagen and Wood—whose skin cells were used to create the clones—consider perfectly ethical is the creation of human clones so they can be killed—legally must be killed—for their parts. That is, they want to create nascent humans to harvest stem cells for “personalized medicine.”
The theory is that if a patient requires stem cells for a cure, the best stem cells would come from his or her genetic replica, their clone. And so the DNA-containing nucleus from one of the patient’s cells is placed into a human egg from which the nucleus has been removed and the combination is stimulated into dividing. Thus a human embryo is created and days later killed to extract the stem cells needed for the cure.
Will this kind of “personalized medicine” work? There’s scant evidence that it will and some evidence that it won’t. And besides, scientists have already found ways to “reprogram” skin cells so that they become stem cells obviating the need to manufacture an embryo.
As Richard Dorflinger of the US Catholic Bishops told the Post, the creation of clones “does not show that a viable or normal embryonic stem cell line can be derived this way, or that any such cell has ‘therapeutic’ value. It does not answer the ethical or social questions about the mass-production of developing human lives in order to destroy them.”
And if we can clone and kill embryos that are days old, why not, as technology allows, grow fetuses in artificial wombs (already well along in development) to harvest spare body parts for transplantation?
In their new book, Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, Princeton professor and IRD board member Robert George and Christopher Tollefsen, a philosopher at the University of South Carolina, argue that the only way to avoid runaway biotechnology is to affirm three essential truths.
“First, human embryos are human beings…. Second, we, the readers and authors of this book, and all other beings that are essentially like us are human beings…. Third, because all human beings are persons, all human beings are subjects of absolute human rights, including the right not to be intentionally killed.”
While George and Tollefsen marshal careful arguments to establish these three affirmations, they are, at the same time, intuitive. We can deny that we know that they are true, but we can’t help but know that we’re fooling ourselves when we do. A human embryo is, if nothing else, human, that is, one of us. And humans ought never to be turned into commodities—means to someone else’s ends.
Even Samuel Wood of Stemagen seems to understand. Asked by the Post what it was like to see five genetic replicas of himself, he replied, “It is very difficult to look at an embryo and realize it is what you were a few decades ago. It is you, in a way.” Precisely. And that is why it is thoroughly immoral to turn around and kill embryos for the benefit of others.
Would that things were so simple! They’re not.
“We live in a difficult age,” write George and Tollefsen. “Convictions once widely shared about the value of unborn human life have been eroded over the past forty years, especially following the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade. Moreover, intense excitement about the possibility of new knowledge and better health creates incentives that make it difficult to think clearly about our obligations to others, especially when those others are very small, utterly defenseless, and do not look or seem ‘like us.’”
Yet as philosophers and theologians have argued for centuries, it is to the small and defenseless that we have the greatest duty. The Daily Mail reported that John Smeaton, of Great Britain’s Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, reacted to the Stemagen news saying: “We have got scientists wandering around in an ethical wilderness, forgetting about matters of justice relating to our fellow human beings.” Favoring the strong over the weak, the rich over the poor, the strong over the defenseless is a beach of justice.
In his famous sermon, “The Weight of Glory,” C.S. Lewis wrote, “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. …Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses.”
And that is as true of your neighbor across the back fence is it is of your neighbor in the Petri dish or the womb.
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