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Today's appeal by almost a hundred experts in medicine, law,
ethics and science provides a dose of well-grounded fact and clear thinking to the debate
on human embryo research. Tragically, the current Administration's role in this
debate has consisted of misinformation, evasion and hypocrisy.
Citing
a legal memorandum drafted by the former legal director of the National Abortion Rights
Action League, the National Institutes of Health claims that when it rewards researchers
for having embryos destroyed for their stem cells, it is not involved in helping to
destroy embryos.
Apparently if the NIH staff ever saw the Sam Peckinpah film
"Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia," they came out of the theater very
surprised that the person giving that order wanted Mr. Garcia dead. "Bring me the
dismembered inner cells of those embryos," says the NIH -- but we are supposed to
ignore the fact that this is an order to make those embryos dead.
Can this really be a way of implementing the federal ban on funding
lethal embryo research? By that logic, the government should begin providing federal funds
to purchase the organs of assisted suicide victims from Jack Kevorkian -- as a way of
implementing the federal ban on funding assisted suicide.
What NIH proposes is not an interpretation of the law at all, but a
transparent effort to circumvent the law. Even members of the National Bioethics Advisory
Commission (NBAC), who strongly support lethal embryo research, have pointed out that the
NIH policy is disingenuous. As NBAC member Alexander Capron has said, we are not living in
the fairy tale "The Elves and the Shoemaker." The NIH does not wake up in the
morning and say "Oh, embryonic stem cells are on my workbench! The elves must have
brought them in the night!" It is the NIH, after all, that is offering to pay the
elves to come up with high-quality shoe leather. As NBAC said in its draft report in May,
the NIH proposal will make all taxpayers "complicit in the death of embryos."
NBAC is now paying the price for its candor. The NIH's allies
-- especially those who wrote the thoroughly discredited NIH report on embryo research
five years ago -- now say that the Commission's ethical insight is "politically
imprudent," and must be deleted from future drafts. So this week, NBAC suddenly
canceled its scheduled second day of public discussion on this issue, to caucus behind
closed doors to provide a politically correct -- and useless -- final document. So much
for clear thinking on ethics, when it conflicts with the political bottom line.
The most tragic aspect of this campaign is that it is all so
unnecessary. In the last six months, it has become undeniably clear that there are morally
acceptable alternatives to embryonic stem cell research -- alternatives that are medically
as promising, or more promising, in the treatment of disease. Yet in order to justify this
ideological campaign for harmful embryo research, the NIH and its allies have ignored or
misrepresented these advances, which offer such great hope to the sick and suffering.
There is no conflict here between science and ethics. This is a
struggle between ethically responsible science, and the irresponsible abuse of human life
in the name of science. By every possible avenue, Congress should see to it that the
former prevails.
Richard M. Doerflinger - Mr.
Doerflinger is Associate Director for Policy Development at the Secretariat for Pro-Life
Activities, National Conference of Catholic Bishops; and Adjunct Fellow in Bioethics and
Public Policy at the National Catholic Bioethics Center. He has presented testimony on
human embryo research before Congress, National Institutes of Health advisory groups, and
the National Bioethics Advisory Commission. He has contributed articles on this and other
medical-moral issues to Linacre Quarterly, Hastings Center Report, Duquesne
Law Review, and Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal (in press). |
