The Unchosen Frozen
Second Thoughts on Biotechnology & In Vitro Fertilization
by William L. Saunders
The television crews were ready. The tourists and autograph hounds were pulsing with excitement. The buzz was on: Superman was coming to Capitol Hill. Christopher Reeve, who had portrayed the Man of Steel in several movies but now was confined to a wheelchair as a result of a horse-riding accident, was in Washington to support the use of human embryonic stem cells in research, research that might cure injuries like his own.
A few weeks later, another beloved actor of his generation, Michael J. Fox—who starred in the Back to the Future movies—announced he was leaving his hit television show, Spin City, due to problems related to Parkinson’s disease. Like Reeve, Fox supported research using human embryonic stem cells.
Other interested groups joined in. “What the patient groups have been saying all along is, ‘Get on with this,’” declared Daniel Perry, chairman of the Patients’ Coalition for Urgent Research, which had been formed to support funding of embryonic stem-cell research. “We want this for our loved ones.”1 One television news program after another featured family members pleading that such research proceed.
Frankly, how could anyone argue with these dramatic and emotional appeals? Certainly the benefits of embryonic stem-cell research would, if realized, be enormous: a cure for Parkinson’s disease for sufferers like Fox, regeneration of nerve cells for paraplegics like Reeve, a way of creating new organs for those needing transplants, and perhaps a cure for juvenile diabetes. (It must be noted that the claims for human embryonic stem-cell research have yet to be validated in laboratory tests and that “adult” stem cells can be taken from other sources—umbilical cord blood, placentas, and a person’s own tissues and organs—without destroying human beings at any stage of development.)
Both Fox and Reeve explained their endorsement of human embryonic stem-cell research in the same terms. Since the frozen embryos left over from in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures—an estimated 400,000—are only “a mass of cells slated for disposal,” using them as research material promises to make them “useful.” Reeve asked: “Is it more ethical for a woman to donate unused embryos that will never become human beings, or to let them be tossed away as so much garbage when they could help save thousands of lives?”2
A Reasonable Question
A reasonable question, and to many Americans a persuasive one. However, to “isolate” these stem cells for research, the embryo itself must be destroyed. If the human embryo is a human being, his destruction is no less than the taking of an innocent human life.
Since, as I will show below, embryos at all stages of development are human beings, embryonic stem-cell research can only proceed with the killing of the human being from whom the cells are harvested. One human being is being killed to be used as a source of cells or tissue for another, a practice that contradicts the ethical norms of Western culture.
At least since the time of Hippocrates, an ethic that respects human life has guided the disciplines of medicine and science. The Nuremberg Code, which condemned the atrocities of the Nazis and affirmed the ethical principles of the civilized world, declared: “No experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur.” Indeed, it even requires that “proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability, or death.”3
William L. Saunders is Senior Vice President and Senior Counsel at Americans United for Life.
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