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8/11/05 Ethical Embryocide? Charles Krauthammer, with whom I rarely disagree on weighty matters, has weighed in on recent "advances" in the debate over embryonic stem cell research. In his column in the Washington Post (Aug. 4, 2005) he writes: "It is a good idea to expand federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. It is a bad idea to do that without prohibiting research that uses embryos created specifically to be used in research and destroyed." His first ethical point is that zygotes and blastocysts, though human, do not have all the rights of human beings. It is no great moral loss to dismember one if it was to be destroyed anyway. But then he goes on to suggest that "the real threat to our humanity is the creation of new human life willfully for the sole purpose of making it the means to someone else's end -- dissecting it for its parts the way we would dissect something with no more moral standing than a mollusk or paramecium." It is implicit in his argument that an embryo from a fertility clinic was not a "new human life willfully" created as "the means to someone else's end." But is that even so? Presumably a batch of embryos is created in the clinic in the attempt to provide a sufficient number of embryos to guarantee at least one or two will end up viable and grow to become children. At first, any of the embryos might end up being those children, but it was never part of the plan to guarantee all of them a chance at a full life. They are all means to the end of creating those that end up living a full life, so all those that are discarded were effectively created as "the means to someone else's end", which Krauthammer rightly views as a self-evident outrage. He just doesn't see that this outrage applies to the cases he views as morally neutral. How can it be that an embryo to be discarded can be dissected as "something with no more moral standing than a mollusk or paramecium" but an embryo created to be dissected cannot be so dissected? Both are means to someone else's end. The use to which a human being is to be put cannot be the determinant of that human being's rights or lack thereof. Either a human embryo can't be pressed into service to the needs of others at any time (whatever his fate might be otherwise) or he can be pressed into the service of anyone's needs at any time. I am not religious. I am philosophical. And there is a universal principle at play here that has yet to be properly articulated (at least in popular culture--surely it has been articulated somewhere). The principle is that human material--all the "stuff" of which we are made and which is part of the support for our existence--cannot be owned by anyone other than the human being in, by, for and of whose body it was made. This principle excludes slavery, because our blood, sweat, and tears are not made to serve others unless we choose to make them do so. It excludes compulsary organ donation whether before or after death. It excludes compulsary donation of blood or plasma, even though such donations would be of minimal impact to the life or happiness of any person. It excludes the creation of any human life to serve the needs of another. It excludes the use of the body and tissues of an embryo to save any life other than that of the embryo himself. It excludes the creation of a batch of embryos so that one or two might live and the others be flushed like so many dead fish. Human life is special and precious to all of us. We must not prostitute it to the needs of others, even our own loved ones or ourselves. It would be wrong to euthanize even one innocent baby to save a million or a billion lives. And there is no criterion by which you can distinguish a zygote or blastocyst and make it all right to exterminate any number of them to serve the needs of others without opening the door to a lot of other utilitarian arguments to compromise human rights. Dead people don't need their organs, because they can never live again. Living people can do without one kidney, some blood each month, and lots of other replaceable tissues and body parts. So unless you want to be forced by society to surrender all the body parts you can spare to serve the needs of humanity, do not ask any other human being to give any of his or her own without consent. That is the only consistent ethical position I see that we can take. Modified: 08/17/2005 |
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