Stem Sell Job
Gilbert Meilaender on Why The Christian Century Is Wrong About “Spare” Embryos
More than any other strand of Christian denominational existence in America, mainline Protestant churches have sought to shape public life. The will to do that still remains, though the energy may be diminishing. But more important than either the will or the energy is the question of what wisdom, if any, these churches have to offer us on controverted issues in our public life. The answer to that question can sometimes be rather disappointing, and I offer here a brief example.
In its June 28, 2005 issue, The Christian Century ran a (rather brisk) editorial, “Lives of the embryo,” in which it commented on the public debate about whether it would be right to destroy (so-called) spare embryos in order to procure stem-cell lines for scientific research. President Bush, the editorial suggested, “has chosen an odd place to draw a line against stem cell research.”
The editorial provides both an occasion to examine some of the claims made by those who advocate such use of spare embryos and an opportunity to ponder one way in which this formerly influential strand of Protestant tradition would shape our public life.
Attentive Skepticism
Four claims, in particular, merit both attention and a good dose of skepticism:
(1) “There is little moral hazard in extracting stem cells from embryos that are going to be either destroyed or frozen indefinitely. Nothing is lost that would not be lost anyway, and something of enormous benefit may be gained.”
Perhaps, just to help awaken us from our dogmatic slumbers, we may juxtapose this claim with a passage from Robert J. Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors. Discussing the way in which doctors at Auschwitz were “hungry for surgical experience,” he writes:
In the absence of ethical restraint, one could arrange exactly the kind of surgical experience one sought, on exactly the appropriate kinds of ‘cases’ at exactly the time one wanted. If one felt Hippocratic twinges of conscience, one could usually reassure oneself that, since all of these people were condemned to death in any case, one was not really harming them.
The context is different, but the form of reasoning should sound familiar, and this is morally hazardous company to keep. Christians—so attuned to the language of compassion that they may become deaf to other aspects of moral language—need regularly to remind themselves that “harm” is not the only important moral consideration. It is quite possible to “wrong” one whom we do not harm. With that in mind, perhaps we should be less hasty than the Century’s editorial to assume that there is no “moral hazard” in using and destroying even “spare” embryos.
Why does the fact that these embryos are condemned (by our decision) to die make them available for our use? True, they are almost surely destined to die. What follows? Not that we should feel free to use them for our purposes, but, rather, that, as Hans Jonas once argued with respect to the terminally ill, we should spare them “the gratuitousness of service to an unrelated cause.” It is one thing for us to acquiesce in the death of these embryos; it is quite another for us to embrace their death as our aim, to seize upon it as an advantageous opportunity to use them yet again for our purposes.
Gilbert Meilaender is the Duesenberg Professor in Christian Ethics at Valparaiso University. His books include Neither Beast nor God: The Dignity of the Human Person (Encounter Books) and Should We Live Forever?: The Ethical Ambiguities of Aging (Eerdmans). He is a Lutheran.
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