Here's more from William Saletan, who, in last Sunday's New York Times, reviewed a new book called Embryo: A Defense of Human Life. In Wednesday's Slate, he returns to the subject:

Are embryos morally equal to people? I say no. Robert George, a member of President Bush's bioethics council, and his colleague Christopher Tollefsen say yes. In their new book, Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, George and Tollefsen conclude not only that embryo-destructive stem-cell research should be defunded but that any research involving embryos should be banned if it even slightly risks an embryo's health. They propose to halt the common practice of producing extra embryos during in vitro fertilization and to require that every IVF embryo be transferred to a womb.

In Sunday's New York Times, I reviewed the book's arguments. A day later, the authors replied on National Review Online. This is a conversation worth pursuing. George and Tollefsen are pushing the discussion into an area—embryology—where, in contrast to the usual shrieking about abortion, real progress can be made. They're civil, logical, and smart. I've seen George pick apart fuzzy-thinking adversaries at meetings of the bioethics council. It's like watching a cat with mice. Today, unfortunately, I'll be the mouse.

The virtue of Embryo is that the authors stake their case on science and logic, not religion. What makes you a human being, they argue, isn't a soul, but "a developmental program (including both its DNA and epigenetic factors) oriented toward developing a brain and central nervous system." They believe that this program starts at conception and therefore, so does personhood.

I like this bet on science. It's scrupulous, brave, and constructive. Let's toss in our chips and call the bet. We'll have to accept what science shows: Conception is, as George and Tollefsen argue, the sharpest line we could draw to mark the onset of moral worth. But they, in turn, will have to accept the other side of what science shows: The lines of embryology are dotted, not solid. Such lines don't warrant severe categorical restrictions on stem-cell research or assisted reproduction.

Also:

George and Tollefsen assume a clear distinction between wholes and parts. Eggs and sperm are parts, they reason, while an embryo is a whole. At conception, the parts become a whole, the program launches, and personhood begins. But it isn't that simple. Some embryos divide after conception to become two or more people. Are those embryos, prior to twinning, an individual?

And:

The egg-embryo distinction, too, is permeable. George and Tollefsen write that eggs must combine with sperm or die. They say an organism "was never itself a sperm cell or an ovum." But look what just happened at a zoo in Kansas: another case of parthenogenesis—eggs becoming offspring without fertilization. This process has produced adults in dozens of vertebrate species, including sharks and turkeys.

I highly recommend that you read the whole article (and George and Tollefsen's response to Saletan's original review). It's a fascinating, intelligent back-and-forth on this blog's signature topic, the beginning of human life.

Labels: beginning of human life, bioethics, embryo, William Saletan

I've come across an interesting book, of interest to anyone with an interest in genetic engineering; I haven't read it yet, but I have read reviews of it from two respectable sources.

The book, The Case Against Perfection, is a brief little thing -- a little over 160 pages long -- written by Michael J. Sandel, a professor of political philosophy at Harvard. Sandel first laid out the principles of the book in in an even shorter essay for The Atlantic Monthly in 2004, an essay of the same title:

Breakthroughs in genetics present us with a promise and a predicament. The promise is that we may soon be able to treat and prevent a host of debilitating diseases. The predicament is that our newfound genetic knowledge may also enable us to manipulate our own nature—to enhance our muscles, memories, and moods; to choose the sex, height, and other genetic traits of our children; to make ourselves "better than well." When science moves faster than moral understanding, as it does today, men and women struggle to articulate their unease. In liberal societies they reach first for the language of autonomy, fairness, and individual rights. But this part of our moral vocabulary is ill equipped to address the hardest questions posed by genetic engineering. The genomic revolution has induced a kind of moral vertigo.
...
It is often assumed that the powers of enhancement we now possess arose as an inadvertent by-product of biomedical progress—the genetic revolution came, so to speak, to cure disease, and stayed to tempt us with the prospect of enhancing our performance, designing our children, and perfecting our nature. That may have the story backwards. It is more plausible to view genetic engineering as the ultimate expression of our resolve to see ourselves astride the world, the masters of our nature. But that promise of mastery is flawed. It threatens to banish our appreciation of life as a gift, and to leave us with nothing to affirm or behold outside our own will.

The two reviews have different characters, as befits their different sources. In July, William Saletan reviewed it for the New York Times, under the headline "Tinkering With Humans," and takes issue with it:

...Sandel’s egalitarian fatalism already feels a bit 20th-century. The older half of me shares his dismay that some parents feel blamed for carrying babies with Down syndrome to term. But my younger half cringes at his flight from the “burden of decision” and “explosion of responsibility” that come with our expanding genetic power. Given a choice between a world of fate and blamelessness and a world of freedom and responsibility, I’ll take the latter. Such a world may be, as Sandel says, too daunting for the humans of today. But not for the humans of tomorrow.

(Saletan, who writes the "Human Nature" column for Slate, was the stimulus of another recent post here on the Beginning of Human Life blog.)

For a more recent and more dispassionate review, see Marc Baer's entry in the October 16th issue of Metapsychology Online Reviews:

This engaging book, with its rich use of current examples and direct argumentation, is more suited to those who are not specialists in ethics than those who are, but the professional, too, can learn much from it. And though it is slim in size, one should not be led into thinking that the argumentation is superficial. Quite the contrary. Although Sandel is not always persuasive and his defense of the principles of giftedness stops where one wishes more would be said, e.g., with the claim that individuals do not fully own their talents, he nevertheless presents his view and that of his opponents clearly, addresses a number of objections to his proposals, and carries many of the arguments out multiple steps. In so doing, Sandel provides a well-articulated perspective on the debate that may do much to stem the perfectionist tide. In his capable hands, this is done without what might otherwise be the implication that this opposition must result from intellectual naivete.

I'm not sure where I stand on these questions, and hope to do another post on them after I've thought some more. But I'm very glad someone is asking them.

Labels: bioethics, genetic engineering, philosophy

Sean Doherty's blog goes by the unprepossessing title "Welcome to Sean's Blog." More telling is what one might call the sub-title -- a phrase he's chosen to appear, beneath the title, at the top of every page. The phrase: "green happyclappy christian ethics blog."

It's important, I think, to note that Doherty is not writing from a USA-centric perspective. He's a curate at St Gabriels, Cricklewood -- a Church of England congregation in northwest London. And as such, when he uses the word "Christian," you needn't worry that the issues he considers will be considered from a hotbutton perspective. (It's a sad commentary on civic life here in the USA that when you couple the word "Christian" with the phrase "beginning of human life," you will hunker down in either eye-rolling dread or hearty anticipation, depending on your own perspective.) This is also reflected in his unqualified linking of the word "green" with the word "Christian"; so much of the left in the USA (wrongly) equates "Christian" with "conservative" that a "green Christian" may sound like a contradiction in terms.

Doherty has a particular interest in medical ethics. His blog devotes an entire category to the subject; and he's the author of Foundations for Medical Ethics, available from Grove Books. (You should decidedly not confuse Grove Books with the USA-based Grove Press.) Here's what the Grove Books site says about the book:

Current discussions about medical ethics often focus on who can make decisions and why—but fail to address the more fundamental question of the purpose of medicine.

This study looks at key theological themes from the Old and New Testaments to provide a framework for ethical reflection—not simply reconfiguring the questions.

Refreshing, isn't it?

In a recent entry, "Embryos: people like you and me," Doherty tackles the core question addressed by this blog here on sossisson.com. Excerpts:

Conception is the beginning of something. Before conception, sperm and eggs do not become anything else. They just are what they are. So their meeting at conception changes them, and begins something. The only really relevant question is, what begins? Is it the beginning of human life as we commonly recognise it in one another (in which case its arbitrary ending could not be justified), or only the beginning of something which will subsequently become human life? (Even if it were the latter, it would still not be at all clear that it would be acceptable to destroy something that if left undisturbed would become human life.)
...
There is no way to exclude human embryos from the category of human life which does not exclude other human beings whom we would regard it as wrong to kill. In particular, if one believes that a human embryo only subsequently becomes human, one must consider when this might be said to happen. If one says one cannot know when it does because it is so gradual, one is stuck back at the point I made above about caution. If one says one can know when this happens e.g. quickening, or viability, one must explain why one does not also on that basis exclude human life which does not possess the extra characteristics e.g. indepdent movement, ability to exist without being plugged into something else. This makes all such points identified subsequent to conception seem rather arbitrary, adopted for convenience rather than because there is any genuinely good reason for them.

Unless there is therefore some form of convincing evidence to the contrary, we must treat the human embryo as a human at a very early stage of development. The burden of proof falls on those who wish to show that it is not a human life, in the same way and for the same reasons that if someone was about to demolish a building using explosives, and they thought that someone might still be inside, the responsibility would fall upon them to make sure there was nobody inside before pressing the plunger.

I'm not myself sure that I buy the blowing-up-the-building analogy. The main problem with it, in my view, is the logical fallacy known as the negative proof:

The fallacy of appealing to lack of proof of the negative is a logical fallacy of the following form:

"X is true because there is no proof that X is false."

It is asserted that a proposition is true, only because it has not been proven false.

The reason this is a fallacious sort of argument might be summed up as: the absence of one thing does not imply the presence of its opposite. In this case, what's missing -- as Doherty is correct in pointing out -- is evidence that an embryo is not human. It's a fatally flawed step from that to, "Without evidence of the non-humanity of an embryo, it must be the case that an embryo is human."

That objection aside, I found Doherty's post to be quite thoughtful and provocative -- a rare combination of attributes in discussions of this all-too-often explosive subject.

Labels: beginning of human life, bioethics, Christianity

It's not exactly fresh news, but I have just come across a very interesting column by William Saletan, on the Slate Web site. The headline: "Rights and Wrongs: Liberals, progressives, and biotechnology."

Saletan identifies himself as a liberal, for what it's worth -- although he doesn't do so until a good way down into the column:

...what makes me think I'm still a liberal? I guess it's a stubborn belief that liberalism isn't whatever dogmas currently possess this or that lefty camp. Liberalism is an admission of uncertainty. It's open to self-correction and to the complexity and unpredictability of life.

What's interesting about the column in general is that he uses it to take certain "liberal" bioethicists (or those who support them, without being bioethicists themselves) to task for, well, their illiberalism:

I have problems with liberals. A lot of them talk about religion as though it's a communicable disease. Some are amazingly obtuse to other people's qualms. They show no more interest in an embryo than in a skin cell. It's like I'm picking up a radio signal and they're not. I'd think I was crazy, except that a few billion other people seem to be picking up the same signal. At most liberal bioethics conferences, the main question in dispute, in one form or another, is whether to be more afraid of capitalism or religion.

But -- lest the reader think he's about to stab his liberal colleagues in the back -- Saletan offers up a deft summation of a common-sense approach not only to stem-cell research, but to many related science-vs.-religion controversies (emphasis added):

I don't even like the idea of taking a general position on biotechnology. The field is just too big and complicated to fit an ideology. In science, things change much more radically than in politics. One month, we're screening embryos for diseases, and everybody's happy. The next month, we're screening embryos for their suitability as tissue donors, and everybody's queasy. One year, ethanol is a corn product and makes no sense. The next year, it's a switchgrass product and makes a lot of sense. I like having the freedom to soak my head in a new topic and come out saying the opposite of what I expected. Committing to a political identity would just get in the way.

In general, the column neatly repudiates the idea that supporting -- or decrying -- a field of scientific study has anything to do with common sense. You can take one position or another, based on one thing or another, but it makes no sense to (a) require a litmus test of someone's beliefs on the issue in order to label them as either a good liberal or a good conservative, or (b) claim that you yourself are a good liberal or a good conservative because of your beliefs on a given issue. Not just bioethics, but life at large, is just too big and complicated to reduce it to a range of acceptable yes and no opinions.

Labels: bioethics, conservative, liberal, stem cell research

TORONTO STAR, Aug 25, 2007 --

Clashes between the high-tech and the holy are looming anew as political changes force stem-cell research back onto the public agenda, raising a host of new bioethical concerns for doctors and patients. And a Toronto physician is going to have his say about where this all leads.

The medical world needs to think about more than just curing diseases and prescribing drugs, says Dr. Bill Sullivan, who has been tapped to advise the Vatican on bioethics, and consider more where those cures come from.

"You can fix the kidney, but the person might not be healed in other ways," continues Sullivan, appointed earlier this month by Pope Benedict XVI to the Pontifical Academy for Life.

True care needs also to address the ethical issues surrounding their care – including the research done to arrive at a treatment. For Sullivan, medical decisions cannot, and should not, be made in a moral vacuum. For the Catholic church, embryonic stem-cell research tops the list of concerns.

"The ethical issues arise where the vulnerable are threatened," Sullivan says, referring to the stem cells destroyed in labs.

He expects such research to get a boost in the coming years as the Bush administration comes to an end, taking with it the White House ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.

The U.S. Congress tried again this year to pass a bill allowing such funding, only to see President George Bush veto it in June. The veto was expected, but the attempt by Congress nonetheless sent a clear message that the rest of Washington supports the work.

Meanwhile, moratoriums restricting stem-cell research in other countries, such as Germany and Australia, are nearing an end, scientific journals are calling for more stem-cell and other research, and Democratic presidential candidates are letting it be known they support the work.

In short, the floodgates of medical and biotechnological research seem about to spring open and with them a whole host of new bioethical concerns.

Shane Green, director of ethics for the Ontario Genome Institute, says new discoveries are being made all the time, even with the Bush ban in place, expanding the ethical questions on a constant basis.

Keep reading.

Here's more:

TORONTO, August 23, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - An official response from the Canadian Diabetes Association indicates the funding organization is in complete support of using human embryos in destructive research.

The Canadian Diabetes Association is the country's foremost organization disseminating information to Canadians on the disease. Its mission is to "promote the health of Canadians through diabetes research, education, service and advocacy." The Association distributes government funding to researchers.

A reply to a query by LifeSiteNews.com elicited an emailed response from "Susan" at the Canadian Diabetes Association Contact Centre who said that the Association "does not currently fund embryonic stem cell research" as of 2004-5.

"All stem cell work funded by the Association is with cells derived from non-embryonic tissues." Susan specified the promise shown by transplant research using pancreatic islet cells as an example of adult stem cell research in diabetes. This treatment involves, however, replacing a patient's islet cells with differentiated donor cells, not stem cells.

Susan went on to write that while the Association "recognizes the need to be respectful of the varying perspectives held by the Canadian public on this sensitive issue," it supports the "Canadian government's direction" on the use of embryos in research.

Complete article here.

Labels: bioethics, Canada, diabetes, embryonic stem cell, stem cell research

A few days ago, Reuters summarized two papers published in the current issue of Nature on using mouse and rat embryonic stem cells in lieu of those from humans, which "should speed up research into regenerative medicine and help in the hunt for cures to a range of diseases." That the two papers -- one from a team at Oxford, the other from a Cambridge group -- were developed concurrently and independently "is a sign of momentum picking up in stem cell research," says the Reuters piece:

Laboratory mice have long been a favourite model for human disease but researchers have been frustrated by the fact that human and mouse stem cells behave very differently.

Now scientists think they may have cracked the problem.

Here on this blog we tend to focus (rightly or wrongly) on the stem-cell debate as a case of common sense at odds with deep-seated religious moral and/or religious beliefs. But it's interesting to think about how the use of non-human embryonic sources both (a) seems to sidestep the debate altogether, and (b) doesn't really sidestep anything after all -- just shoves the real issue out of sight, by removing it from the scrutiny of partisans (on both sides) otherwise focused on the word "human." The issue, not to put too fine a point on it, is that human life is a subset, a special case, of animal life. Hence the question: If we can comfortably come to a consensus about the use of non-human embryonic stem cells for the betterment of human life, can't we come to a consensus about the use of human embryonic stem cells for that purpose? Particularly when the cells in question are earmarked for no other purpose other than disposal?

Note that I'm not arguing here for what the consensus should be. (It would hardly be a consensus if I just told everybody what to believe, hmm?) Given a Sophie's Choice-type dilemma requiring that I save the life of a human or the life of a mouse, but not both, I'd choose the human just as I suppose most of you would. It would be fair to say that I hold human life to be sacred, just as most of you do.

That very notion of the sacredness of human life, perhaps, is where the potential for consensus is greatest. If a human embryonic stem cell is destined for the waste can anyway, why not use it instead to affirm the sacredness of human life as it is or will be lived by actual living, breathing erstwhile embryos who at some time come to term?

Labels: bioethics, embryonic stem cells, medical research, stem cell research, stem cells

Here in the USA, the issues surrounding the start of human life can seem so fraught with ambiguity that coming to any conclusion at all seems exactly the wrong thing to do: Too many people will be hurt, too many lives are at stake, too much offense will be taken -- in short, too much effort yields too much pain.

Wondering what the rest of the world might be up to regarding it all (and hindered by my classically American-Philistine inability to read any language other than English) led me to a number of sites in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. One publication I found quite readable, and useful, was a "Debate Outline" from the Danish Council on Ethics, called The beginning of human life and the moral status of the embryo [367KB PDF]. If you are looking for a decisive conclusion, presented in stone, that will clear things up for you with no ambiguity at all, this is not the text for you. It is, after all, a "debate outline." If, however, you would like to read something to stimulate reasonable discussion -- in your own head if not in actual debate -- you could choose many worse starting points.

The entire thing is 39 A4-sized pages in length but will reward the patient reader. And if your stereotype about Scandinavian thinking on morality and ethics is that their collective mind is already made up -- those free-thinkers! those socialists! those makers of seductive '60s-era Noxzema-shaving-cream TV commercials! -- I urge you to think again.

The "outline" begins by presenting four points of view on the central questions. Here's a particularly enchanting excerpt, this one from the "3rd viewpoint" in a section headed, "When Is There Human Life, and What Moral Status Should It Be Ascribed?":

When does the new human life really come about?, we ask, in order to enable us to distinguish.

...the answer to this question has been rendered impossible -- because, logically speaking, a further fundamental condition is that any precise indication of time is always arbitrary. From experience and from a biological point of view, we simply have no way of knowing when exactly life begins -- an aspect that comes clearly to the fore in the 1st background chapter of this debate outline, where it is stated that the time of fertilization is located within a window of twenty hours. The conclusion is obvious, of course: We have no way of knowing when it takes place. At most we can experience it retrospectively, i.e. see in the rear-view mirror that something new has happened at some point in time.

But that also means that the entire time -- from fertilization to conception -- becomes one borderland.

People have always had a hesitant and cautious approach to such frontier zones. Frontier zones cannot be travelled without falling under their sway. The point, after all, is that we do not know what will happen, or when it will happen. So frontier zones are always brimming with ambiguities, i.e. things that can be interpreted in one of two ways.

In the olden days, for example, such frontier zones lay in the transition between cultivated and uncultivated land; or in the twilight zone between day and night. This is also why the Ancients thought they were precisely the regions or time zones where trolls and elf-maidens got up to their antics. It was here that people were spellbound and enchanted, here that children turned into changelings and here that youthful swains were seduced. So popular experience also had it that special care and vigilance were called for at that particular hour or there on the edge of the moors. We are still travelling frontier zones today, and here too experience is needed. Rationality is simply too narrow a basis on which to act. Quite simply, a natural-science approach is not enough to be able to grasp this multiplicity of meaning, because the urge of natural science is precisely to reduce such complexity.

The brief initial spell between fertilization (the rapturous instant) and conception (embedding in the womb) is one such frontier region. The point here, then, is for all of us to exercise extra attentiveness, reducing our speed and laying down rigid rules as to what is and is not allowed as well as displaying the necessary deference in such matters.

"Deference" certainly seems a concept alien to American discussions of complex political, social, and ethical issues. Our concept of frontier exploration is perhaps shaped too much by pop-culture references -- "How the West Was Won" -- and too little by fables and fairy tales, in which the protagonists tread lightly when setting forth on a journey whose outcome cannot be known in advance.

Labels: ambiguity, beginning of human life, bioethics, debate, Denmark

As a college freshman, I had to take a course in World History. I remember nothing about the course except (a) the professor's name, and (b) his striking description of a particular element of medieval philosophy. Item (b) had to do with how people knew that a thing was that thing, and not another. These medieval philosophers believed, said my professor, that "a table is a table because it partakes of table-ness."

I loved that. And it leads me to the subject of this post. If an acorn is an oak, why? and If a blastocyst is a person, why?

A recent Wired Science posting directs us to a Boston Globe column by Michael J. Sandel, who "teaches political philosophy at Harvard." He is also a former member of the Presidential Council on Bioethics -- yes, during the Bush administration. We may then safely assume that he is well-informed, regarding both the philosophical issues (on both sides of the stem-cell debates) and the position of the Bush administration.

As you can see from the page on the Wired site, both the summary and the complete Globe article have stimulated some of the usual reductio-ad-absurdum exaggerations of opponents views at both extremes of the debate, generally stopping juuuust this side of name-calling.

But, with thanks for bringing our attention to Sandel's column, let's leave behind the Wired blog entry, and focus on the column as it appeared in the Globe. It strikes at the heart of many issues at the heart of this Beginning of Human Life blog, here on sossisson.com.

The column may be broken basically into two sections.

In the first section, Sandel points out that neither pro-life nor pro-choice advocates typically expend a lot of effort trying honestly to understand and respect each other's arguments. He then takes up the gauntlet he has cast down, beginning with the pro-life perspective:

It is important to be clear, first of all, about the embryo from which stem cells are extracted. It is not implanted and growing in a woman's uterus. It is not a fetus. It has no recognizable human features or form. It is, rather, a blastocyst, a cluster of 180 to 200 cells, growing in a petri dish, barely visible to the naked eye. Such blastocysts are either cloned in the lab or created in fertility clinics. The bill pending in Congress would fund stem cell research only on excess blastocysts left over from infertility treatments.

The blastocyst represents such an early stage of embryonic development that the cells it contains have not yet differentiated, or taken on the properties of particular organs or tissues -- kidneys, muscles, spinal cord, and so on. This is why the stem cells that are extracted from the blastocyst hold the promise of developing, with proper coaxing in the lab, into any kind of cell the researcher wants to study or repair.

The moral and political controversy arises from the fact that extracting the stem cells destroys the blastocyst. It is important to grasp the full force of the claim that the embryo is morally equivalent to a person, a fully developed human being. For those who hold this view, extracting stem cells from a blastocyst is as morally abhorrent as harvesting organs from a baby to save other people's lives. This is the position of Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, a leading advocate of the right-to-life position. In Brownback's view, "a human embryo . . . is a human being just like you and me; and it deserves the same respect that our laws give to us all."

And then he moves on to summarize the position of advocates of embryonic stem-cell research:

[Brownback's] argument can be challenged on a number of grounds. First, it is undeniable that a human embryo is "human life" in the biological sense that it is living rather than dead, and human rather than, say, bovine. But this biological fact does not establish that the blastocyst is a human being, or a person. Any living human cell (a skin cell, for example) is "human life" in the sense of being human rather than bovine and living rather than dead. But no one would consider a skin cell a person, or deem it inviolable. Showing that a blastocyst is a human being, or a person, requires further argument.

Some try to base such an argument on the fact that human beings develop from embryo to fetus to child. Every person was once an embryo, the argument goes, and there is no clear, non-arbitrary line between conception and adulthood that can tell us when personhood begins. Given the lack of such a line, we should regard the blastocyst as a person, as morally equivalent to a fully developed human being.

But this argument is not persuasive. Consider an analogy: although every oak tree was once an acorn, it does not follow that acorns are oak trees, or that I should treat the loss of an acorn eaten by a squirrel in my front yard as the same kind of loss as the death of an oak tree felled by a storm. Despite their developmental continuity, acorns and oak trees differ. So do human embryos and human beings, and in the same way. Just as acorns are potential oaks, human embryos are potential human beings.

It's important to note (despite the hair-trigger vitriol with which some commenters at the Wired site respond) that Sandel is here not laying out his own position. He is attempting to describe the positions of others, in a way which shows respect for both sides. And he does a fair job of it.

The second section of the column addresses the real reason why he wrote the whole thing: To call the bluff of the Bush administration on the issue, because in their handling of it so far they have (as usual, hence unsurprisingly) demonstrated a shameless amoral hypocrisy:

...it is a striking feature of the president's position that, while restricting the funding of embryonic stem cell research, he has made no effort to ban it. To adapt a slogan from the Clinton administration, the Bush policy might be summarized as "don't fund, don't ban." But this policy is at odds with the notion that embryos are human beings.

If harvesting stem cells from a blastocyst were truly on a par with harvesting organs from a baby, then the morally responsible policy would be to ban it, not merely deny it federal funding. If some doctors made a practice of killing children to get organs for transplantation, no one would take the position that the infanticide should be ineligible for federal funding but allowed to continue in the private sector. In fact, if we were persuaded that embryonic stem cell research were tantamount to infanticide, we would not only ban it but treat it as a grisly form of murder and subject scientists who performed it to criminal punishment.

Got that? Sandel is telling Bush (and his subordinates) to put up or shut up: If it's truly immoral to harvest stem cells in this manner, then at least have the cojones to make it illegal as well. Sandel concludes:

Rather than simply complain that the president's stem cell policy allows religion to trump science, critics should ask why the president does not pursue the full implications of the principle he invokes.

If he does not want to ban embryonic stem cell research, or prosecute stem cell scientists for murder, or ban fertility clinics from creating and discarding excess embryos, this must mean that he does not really consider human embryos as morally equivalent to fully developed human beings after all.

But if he doesn't believe that embryos are persons, then why ban federally funded embryonic stem cell research that holds promise for curing diseases and saving lives?

To which the only response we can offer, really, is: Amen.

Labels: bioethics, Bush administration, embryonic stem cells, philosophy, stem cells

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Stem cells will be at the top of the agenda for the U.S. Senate when it returns on Tuesday with supporters of the research hoping they can change the president's mind on the issue and opponents hoping to have a say about their stand.

The Senate will consider two bills, one virtually identical to a bill vetoed by President George W. Bush last year that would have expanded and encouraged federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research.

The other is a compromise measure worked out by Republicans Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia and Norm Coleman of Minnesota. It would encourage stem cell research on embryos that have naturally lost the ability to develop into fetuses, such as those that have died "naturally" during fertility treatments.

Read the article here.

Labels: beginning of human life, bioethics, embryonic stem cell, stem cell, stem cell research