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COMMENTARY
March 11, 2009
The horror
President Barack Obama has now reversed President Bush's ban on U.S. taxpayer funding for stem cell research with human embryos. "O brave new world, that has such people in it."The Vatican and U.S. Catholic bishops have responded to Obama's order with criticism that does not go far enough. Monsignor Elio Sgreccia is quoted by Reuters from Rome: "The motive for this decision should be seen in the pressure for profits." While there is big money behind the decision -- a bonanza of U.S. federal funding for investors in such companies as Stemcells Inc., Geron, and Cytori Therapeutics, whose shares have all shot up on the Nasdaq -- I do not think that was the central purpose of the order Obama signed. Cardinal Justin Rigali of Philadelphia gets closer to the nerve, when he calls the decision "a sad victory of politics over science and ethics." Closer, but still not close enough, for the propaganda behind human embryonic research circumvented conventional politics. It was sold superficially by means of false hope to those who suffer from such diseases as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. They were told that cures were being prevented by restrictions on research, when there can be no guarantees that such cures will emerge. But more deeply, a sick juxtaposition has been presented between "science" and "religion," in which the proponents of stem cell research with human embryos have demonized their opponents as something worse than "backward" and indifferent to human suffering. This is the twilight world that C.S. Lewis brilliantly depicted in his science fiction novel, That Hideous Strength, in which the appropriators of "science" go out of their way to insult moral and religious sensibilities, hunting and hounding those who defend them. They attack the sacred because it is sacred. This is the only possible construction on a propaganda that seeks no middle way, which will not concede that the human embryo is "human" in any spiritual, moral, or legal sense. President Obama's order made no concessions whatever to the ethicists who suggested, for instance, requiring researchers to show that their work could not be done with non-embryonic stem cells, or encouraging the development of non-embryonic alternatives. And this, despite the fact that his order implicates every American taxpayer in the funding of acts which are an abomination to many millions of them. The Vatican has argued that "a real democracy" must offer fundamental protection to human life at every stage, from conception to natural death. The "protection" part of this argument is absolutely coherent, for once the clear line between human and non-human is erased, there are no moral backstops. But the "democracy" part is incoherent, and even misleading. If we go instead to the heart of the United States Constitution, we find no mention of democracy there. Quite the opposite: we find in the document itself, and throughout the writings associated with it, warnings of danger if "the people" can simply vote to overturn the moral and constitutional order. For the U.S. is to provide a government "of laws, not of men." The sanctity of human life is something that precedes democracy, and the most fundamental liberty -- life itself -- must not depend on the vagaries of polling. The President declared that he is against human cloning. This was, typically for him, a rhetorical manoeuvre, belied by his deed. For what can a promise to prevent human cloning mean, when his decision opens the door wide to just such eventualities? Here is where "science" turns finally against itself, and becomes monstrous; where reason turns against reason, as it did in the French (and not the American) Revolution. There is nowhere to draw a coherent line, once we have allowed scientists to "experiment" on live human embryos. There was nowhere to draw a line, once the French revolutionaries decided that human life itself was less important than the utopian future of their hallucinations. What is in a human embryo? We are constantly told, by those who mock "the sanctity of human life," that chimpanzees share 98 per cent of our DNA. But the key instructions on brain-growing are in the remaining two per cent, as we discovered from the Human Genome Project. All neurons start from a single cell in an embryo, but the human ones are instructed to keep doubling for more rounds than any monkey, and to create in due course a brain whose cortex alone co-ordinates a billion synaptic connections, and whose overall complexity exceeds that of any object known in the entire Universe. It yields an instrument capable (according to the calculations of Edelman and Tononi) of some 10 to at least the millionth power of possible neural circuits: a number hyperastronomically beyond the total number of particles in the universe. That is a single glimpse into what emerges from a human embryo. These numbers alone should fill us with horror at what is being done in our labs. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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