Ethics in Limbo

Fifty Republicans in the House last month defied their president’s veto threat to pass a bill (H.R. 810) that would lift current funding restrictions on destroying human embryos. Lawmakers want researchers to gain access to a scientific treasure trove of more than 400,000 frozen embryos created by in-vitro fertilization and currently in cold storage at fertility clinics around the country.

One Republican renegade is self-described pro-lifer Jo Ann Emerson, R-Mo., whose mother-in-law had died the night before of Alzheimer's. "I must follow my heart on this and cast a vote in favor," Emerson said.

When it comes to turning human flesh into raw material for medical experimentation, more and more people are willing to follow their hearts. After the president announced his compromise position on funding research to then-existing embryonic stem-cell lines, in 2002 the American people narrowly supported such research by 43 percent to 38 percent, according to the Pew Forum. Today, the margin has swelled to 56 percent in favor to 32 percent opposed.

Apparently the relentless appeals to people’s emotions by scientists eager to find hypothetical but unproven cures (and abundant research dollars) are working. But despite all the hype, it’s a fact that embryonic stem cells have treated no diseases.

Compare this hype to real scientific progress via stem cells taken from umbilical cords, which do not involve the destruction of developing human life. To date, stem cells taken from cord blood have treated 57 different diseases.

But more and more people don’t want to be saddled with ethical limits or confused with inconvenient scientific facts. In a recent editorial, the Los Angeles Times glossed over these facts by saying, “It’s not a choice between a human life and an embryo’s life. It’s a choice between real human lives and a symbolic statement about the value of an embryo.”

Pro-experimentation advocates are willing to help the human being they can see (a mother-in-law, for example) by killing the human being they can't see (the embryo). Rep. Joe Barton, R-Tex., closed the debate on H.R. 810 by saying, "If given a choice, err on the side of opportunity."

Remember when (not so long ago) people used to talk about erring on the side of life?

There’s not much chance of that these days. Even President Bush’s 2001 compromise policy allows researchers to destroy human embryos for their stem cells. Once he made that decision–in a well-meaning but muddled attempt to protect taxpayers from having to pay, as in abortion, for a morally objectionable act–the question shifted from whether we should kill embryos to how many.

And with those 400,000 human embryos “going to waste” in cryogenic limbo, it was only a matter of time until the answer to the how many question became quite high indeed. As impossible as this sounds, we urgently need to revisit the whether question.

Despite the immeasurable joy and the thousands of children the technique has helped bring into the world, in-vitro fertilization is fraught with moral problems. Many of the embryos created in the proverbial “test tube” are destroyed once doctors discover abnormalities. Many of the embryos die on their own. Because of the prohibitive costs, physicians in this line of work also routinely counsel infertile couples to allow the creation of “extra” embryos–to be frozen, used later, or (if unneeded) discarded.

Unfortunately, sometimes pro-life Christians, desperate to have biological children, participate in in-vitro techniques, turning blind eyes to the ethical dilemmas. Others have sought to redeem the practice by encouraging the parents of frozen embryos to donate them to infertile couples for adoption.

In fact, in his May 24 remarks on bioethics, President Bush highlighted 21 children between the ages of three months and seven years who were formerly frozen embryos. “Rather than discard these embryos,” President Bush said, “or turn them over for research that destroys them, these families have chosen a life-affirming alternative.”

Such efforts by the Snowflakes Frozen Embryo Adoption Program, a Fullerton, California-based nonprofit agency, represent a small but nonetheless encouraging response to our society’s potentially fatal bout of emotional utilitarianism.

These programs are valuable not just for the human lives they save but for the images they provide in a shallow, media-saturated culture. If the American people will no longer respond to plain scientific facts and detailed ethical reasoning, then pro-lifers will have to change tactics and give them faces, stories, and sound bites.

In the shadow of those 400,000 souls on ice, the alternative is chilling.