Vatican Denounces Embryonic Stem Cell Research and Fertilisation Treatments
Wednesday last week Declan was diagnosed with a viral infection in the Royal London Hospital and is only now starting to recover. He got it while we were snoozing in the doorway of an unused building as we waited for 1.00am to bed down in our sleeping pitch – since 7 September we have been sleeping tucked away, about twenty paces from the side entrance of a building, down some twelve steps; prior to that we slept for almost two years in a porch. The previous blog gives a brief account of some of the events of late, so I won’t repeat myself. Of course we are still being told, pretty much every working night now, to stay away until 1.00am due to there being a “function” (we get up at 4.20am M-F; 6.20am on weekends), and on Monday we were again hosed out of the pitch. The company that owns the building is a Livery Company – a self-contained society with a strong commitment to charitable causes; it also plays an important part in the system of local government in the City of London, reflecting its historical roots (see www.heraldicmedia.com). In fact, communications started out cordial between us and employees: the company not only fund raises for science education (Declan’s petition to the UN on research cloning of embryos and stem cells has been signed by 587 scientists and academics, including 24 Nobel Laureates, despite months of serious spamming), but run a project for the homeless.
In its most authoritative declaration on bioethics for more than 20 years, the Vatican on Friday reinforced its hostility to a wide range of techniques and treatments that have become available in recent decades, said The Guardian. They included IVF, embryonic stem cell research, the morning-after pill and the contraceptive drug mifepristone. The 36-page document endorsed by Pope Benedict XVI also condemns the creation of hybrid human-animal embryos – demanded by researchers looking to cure diseases because of a shortage of human eggs – which is now legal in the UK thanks to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008.
The document stopped short of declaring that human embryos were people, according to The Guardian. The pope’s chief adviser on bioethical issues, Monsignor Rino Fisichella, told a press conference that such a declaration would have embroiled the Vatican in a “very complex philosophical debate”. But, he said, the document fully backed the idea that a human embryo had the “dignity typical of a person”. And he noted this was an “advance” on the position taken in the Vatican’s last high-level pronouncement, its 1987 instruction entitled Donum Vitae (The Gift of Life).
The formulation in its latest document, Dignitas Personae (The Dignity of the Person) comes close to equating with murder such practices as the destruction of defective embryos in IVF, said The Guardian. On one issue – what to do with frozen, “orphan” embryos – the Vatican admitted it was flummoxed. Dignitas Personae rules out every apparent solution: their destruction, their donation to infertile couples and their use for therapeutic or experimental purposes. It said that proposals for the adoption of unwanted embryos were “praiseworthy in intention”, but fraught with problems.
Fisichella’s predecessor as president of the Pontifical Pro-life Academy, Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, said: “Our basic advice is that the freezing [of the embryos] ought not to be done.” It created “a blind alley”; a situation “the correction of which implies another mistake”. Neither he nor any of the other Vatican officials at the presentation would venture an opinion on what they considered the lesser evil.
According to The Guardian, the document otherwise restates the Catholic church’s opposition to abortifacient forms of contraception, or those it regards as such. These include the world’s most widely used method of reversible contraception, the intrauterine device (IUD) or coil. Dignitas Personae said most forms of artificial fertilisation were “to be excluded” on the grounds that they replaced “the conjugal act” as a means of reproduction. And it said pre-implantation diagnosis during IVF, in which embryos are examined for defects or to determine gender or other characteristics, was “shameful and utterly reprehensible”.
Saying life was sacred from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death, the document also defended the Catholic church’s right to intervene on such matters. It accepted, however, that Catholic parents, especially in the US, might have no alternative to having their children inoculated with vaccines produced with cells from aborted foetuses. It also stressed that stem cell research “should be encouraged” if the tissue is obtained from adults, umbilical cord blood or foetuses that have died naturally (Hooper, The Guardian, 13/12).
Thomas Murray of the Hastings Center told the Washington Post
that the guide “is significant in the sense that the church has now laid down a marker on these important issues … The church has now dug in and committed itself to an official position.”
The document has drawn criticism from many groups, said the Washington Post. “The Vatican’s statement on bioethics shows that it is once again on the wrong side of science and the needs of contemporary society,” said Jon O’Brien, president of Catholics for Choice. Infertility doctors and stem cell researchers defended their efforts. “It has contributed to the quality of life of patients and families through the improved ability to have children, which clearly is a worthwhile goal and a focus of many couples in their life goals,” said Robert Brzyski of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. Said George Daley of the International Society for Stem Cell Research: “Cells are not people and embryos are not people, and my first responsibility as a physician is to patients – not cells in a petri dish.”
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), argues in a piece in The New Republic titled “The Stupidity of Dignity” (posted 28 May) that the concept of dignity is natural ground on which to build an obstructionist bioethics. “An alleged breach of dignity provides a way for third parties to pass judgment on actions that are knowingly and willingly chosen by the affected individuals,” he writes. “It thus offers a moralistic justification for expanded government regulation of science, medicine, and private life. And the Church’s franchise to guide people in the most profound events of their lives – birth, death, and reproduction – is in danger of being undermined when biomedicine scrambles the rules. It’s not surprising, then, that ‘dignity’ is a recurring theme in Catholic doctrine: The word appears more than 100 times in the 1997 edition of the Catechism and is a leitmotif in the Vatican’s recent pronouncements on biomedicine” (see blog of 23 May “The Stupidity of Dignity”).
