Stem cells and morality

The police didn't wake us up in the middle of the night over the holiday weekend to tell us to pack our bags and leave the porch right away due to police "cleaning" the City of London of rough sleepers – we have been sleeping in this porch since being forced to become rough sleepers on 3 November 2006. As I wrote in the previous blog, the first time we were told to pack up and leave was on 9 May (see blog "Letter to the Mayor of London"), and after that, on 17 May (see blog "Letter to the British Prime Minister"). On the first occasion, PC 698B told us the "cleaning" would carry on for a month, so we may very well be visited again. (Sleeping in the porch is still eventful though. For example: this morning, for the first time in a year and a half, the cleaner – who since mid-April has been going in and out through the porch door every weekday morning between 4.00am and 5.15am (we get up at 4.30am) – cleaned the outside of the door while we were packing to leave; on Sunday night somebody threw a cigarette butt, burning a hole in my sleeping bag; and on Saturday night someone parked their car a few feet away, blasting music for forty-five minutes.)

Declan would like to send the Registrar of the European Court of Human Rights more compelling evidence of a violation of Article 34 of the European Convention on Human Rights (see blog of 13 May "Letter to the European Court under Article 34") - Article 34 establishes a duty on Convention states not to subject applicants to any improper indirect acts or contacts designed to dissuade or discourage applicants from pursuing a Convention remedy. So, I would have two questions for the police officer(s): (a) could the ticket we each ought to be issued state that the reason for the encounter is the "cleaning" of rough sleepers from the City of London (on 9 May, PC 698B didn't even issue us tickets; on 17 May, PC 601B wrote that the reason for the encounter was "welfare" – although since when did being told at 1.50am on a Friday night to pack your bags and leave the porch you are sleeping in constitute "welfare"?); and (b) could the tickets state that refusal to leave carries a power of arrest (PC 698B told us to leave or he would arrest us; PC 601B told us we wouldn't be arrested if we didn't leave and wrote on each of our tickets "ATP" for Allowed To Proceed).

Sperm Swimming Towards Egg

The New Statesman this week carries a story entitled "Lisa Jardine on life and death", with the subheadline: "The new chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority did not seek a fight, but she is ready. Christians, she says, have no monopoly on morality." In April Jardine, the Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London, former Booker Prize chair, councillor of the Royal Institution and prolific broadcaster, writer and commentator, became chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the regulatory body tasked with overseeing the areas covered by the new Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill (see blog of 20 May "UK parliament backs human-animal embryo research").

The article says that Jardine didn't even have time to settle into the role before the attacks began. Hybrid embryos, "saviour siblings", the role of fathers in IVF and amendments on abortion limits all provided plenty of issues on which temperatures could, and did, rise. At the end of March, Cardinal Keith O'Brien, head of the Catholic Church in Scotland, condemned the bill's proposals on human-animal embryo research as "a public government endorsement of experiments of Frankenstein proportion", and the Anglican Bishop of Durham, Tom Wright, said that all denominations of Christians, as well as Jews and Muslims, should object to what he called "species-bending".

Commenting on the Catholic view on hybrid embryos, which will not be allowed to live beyond 14 days, but whose creation the Church still considers to be an intolerable meddling with human life, Jardine says: "It was only relatively recently that the date at which the soul enters the embryo was moved back to fertilisation. St Augustine believed that it happened when the baby kicked in the womb - 17 weeks - and that suited for a very long time. This isn't conscience, this is Church ruling." (The New Statesman article adds that Pope Pius IX removed the distinction between "unformed" and "formed" foetuses in 1869; prior to that, a number of theologians, including Thomas Aquinas as well as Augustine, accepted that "ensoulment" occurred later than conception.)

So when does Jardine think that this mysterious, key stage of life, whatever one calls it, begins? "I think I need consciousness - I've a little bit of a philosophical temperament - and we're a hell of a way from consciousness at 14 days." She adds: "The moment of fertilisation is not a very helpful moment to begin talking about the sanctity of human life. As a woman who's had a long childbearing life, I know perfectly well that any number of embryos were swept away. Maybe [some] naturally, but some of them weren't. Sometimes I'd jumped up and down in the hope that I wasn't pregnant, you know?"

Jardine says she was surprised at the churches' reaction to hybrid embryos for research. When it was put to her by the New Statesman that for many religions - and especially today, when hardline or more strictly orthodox faiths are gaining ground - to obey conscience is not about deciding whether to follow edicts from the pulpit but simply to follow those edicts, Jardine replied: "I think it's not correct for any church to suggest that they have a monopoly on conscience. There is a debate to be had, a serious debate, about conscience." (Also in this week's New Statesman is philosopher Julian Baggini on deciding ethical issues. "When it comes to specific matters of morality, the idea that religious convictions need respect, not interrogation and defence, is absurd," he writes. "The world's major religious texts have nothing to say about stem cells, not least because those words do not appear in any of them. It may be a matter of faith that Christ rose from the dead, but Christians have to defend anything they say about the first stages of life.")

Lisa Jardine has her own answer to the citadels of faith. "My church is education," she says. "It's no accident that I work in the period 1500-1700, which is the time when mass education altered the face of Europe for the better. Individual conscience is something you can't have unless you've been taught the autonomy of decision-making. I have to believe that education will take people beyond regulatory religion. That's why I go on teaching. I still teach because I believe every single person you educate, you help take moral decisions for themselves, rather than be told the rules. I have to believe it."

In a recent article for The New Republic entitled “The Stupidity of Dignity” (see previous blog), Steven Pinker, world-renowned thinker and Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University - and an honorary associate of NAC and early signatory of Declan’s petition to the UN on therapeutic cloning – poses the question: “How did the United States, the world's scientific powerhouse, reach a point at which it grapples with the ethical challenges of twenty-first-century biomedicine using Bible stories, Catholic doctrine, and woolly rabbinical allegory? Part of the answer, Pinker says, lies with the “outsize influence” of Leon Kass, the founding director of the President’s Council on Bioethics, who came to prominence in the 1970s with his moralistic condemnation of in vitro fertilization and, in 2001, convinced President Bush to outlaw federally funded research that used new embryonic stem cell lines.

“Kass packed it [the Council] with conservative scholars and pundits, advocates of religious (particularly Catholic) principles in the public sphere, and writers with a paper trail of skittishness toward biomedical advances, together with a smattering of scientists (mostly with a reputation for being religious or politically conservative),” Pinker writes. “After several members opposed Kass on embryonic stem-cell research, on therapeutic cloning (which Kass was in favor of criminalizing), and on the distortions of science that kept finding their way into Council reports, Kass fired two of them (biologist Elizabeth Blackburn and philosopher William May) and replaced them with Christian-affiliated scholars.”

It’s hard not to conclude that for the Catholic Church in Britain, in the short term at least, life under Kass might be very different to life under Jardine.