I am doing something I thought that I would never do, but I am writing this post in praise of the Catholic church. The church just released its bio-ethics paper that has been in the works for six years. I haven’t read it yet and I will probably disagree with a lot of its conclusions but I want to give them props for putting serious time and effort into asking questions that 99.9% of the population isn’t asking. In the case of bio-ethics, we’re quickly going into the land of scientists doing anything and everything that they possibly can without ever asking if they should. There are serious research efforts happening right now that make Dr. Frankenstein look like a pediatrician handing out lollipops and immunizations.
To my mind, one of the great tragedies of the abortion debate is that it seems to have frozen a lot of people’s views and opinions in time. The question of whether a woman has a right to an abortion is an important one but is almost quaint compared to some of the new ones that are coming every day. Right off the bat, we have over 400,000 estimated embryos in freezers in this country right now as left-overs from IVF procedures. That’s well over half-a-million around the globe and nobody has any clear idea about what to do with them. The biological parents have the right to decide, but most never do and are rarely counseled about it. I’m not a radical pro-lifer, but if I was, I would think that a campaign to save those half million embryos from either disposal or eternity in frozen limbo would be a higher priority that stopping abortions. I am also starting to lean against IVF procedures since they result in these spare embryos. (The Catholic church is also taking a stand against such procedures in its report so I may end up agreeing with them on more than I originally expected …)
I lean pro-choice with some limits but I have to honestly say that the thought of half-a-million embryos in freezers really gives me pause and doubt about the consequences of not believing in some set of rights for embryos. My general views have generally followed a belief that embryos do have rights but that those rights are subordinate to the mother’s. That puts me generally in the pro-choice camp. However, since I do believe in some embryo rights, it is really, really hard to say it is OK to put them in a freezer forever or to throw them in the trash especially since the body of the mother is removed from the equation.
If the fetus is not in the mother’s body, why should her rights trump the embryos’ rights? Also, why should her rights trump the father’s? I can see giving a woman final say on an abortion issue since it is her body not the father’s, but for a donated egg and sperm that results in a embryo outside her body, it really seems the two biological parents would have totally equal rights in terms of deciding what can and can’t be done with the fetuses. These are tough questions that families, communities, legal systems, religious groups and governments should have addressed before we had all of these embryos sitting in freezers. It’s too late now for a good answer but we should be thinking about these things before thousands more end up in frozen limbo.
Cloning, experimentation on fetuses, bringing fetuses to term specifically for organ harvesting, using animals to grow human organs, etc., are all scientific realities at this time. I don’t have any grand ideas or conclusions about any of those things, just a recognition of my own moral doubt and confusion about them. With that it mind, I am willing to salute the Catholic Church for taking the lead on asking these questions because I don’t think there is any other organization, particularly at the international level, that could bring them up as seriously and with such a large audience. Even if a lot of people (including myself) end up disagreeing with their conclusions, at least they are getting the conversation a lot closer to where it needs to be in terms of modern scientific reality.
As a side note and point of information about where science is headed, consider this article. It is about a serious effort to bring a mammoth to life by manipulting the dna of an elephant. The same technology is being considered with manipulating chimpanzee dna with that of a neanderthal. Technically, neanderthal’s aren’t human and are therefore exempt from most currently existing bio-ethics policies regarding cloning and experimentation. There is a definite reality to bio-ethics and scientific research and that is that there is a very limited amount of time before the question “Should we do this?” gets replaced with the question of “Should we have done this?”
With that in mind, once again I want to commend the Catholic Church for asking some of those questions and trying to get a conversation started. Even if I end up disagreeing with most of their policy recommendations, at least they have some.
