In All Things
Strike One for Obama
President Obama will sign an executive order today lifting the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. The decision is not a surprise and despite the demonization of Obama coming from the right, it is a decision that John McCain promised to make as well. Furthermore, I believe that never in my lifetime will the Catholic Church convince non-Catholics that embryonic stem cell research is the affront to human dignity that we believe it to be. An interview with a single patient suffering from Parkinson’s Disease is enough to move most voters away from concern for the dignity of a cluster of cells.
That said, the justifications for the decision coming from the administration are so obnoxious or pathetic or both that this decision can properly be labeled Strike One against Obama.
"This is consistent with the president’s determination to use sound scientific practice, responsible practice of science and evidence, instead of dogma in developing federal policy," said Harold Varmus, the co-chair of Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Varmus has won a Nobel Prize, and I haven’t, but you would think his bachelor’s degree in English would have been sufficient to teach him to be more careful about his choice of words. Dogma, to many of us, is not a bad word and I certainly resent its use in such a way. The dogmatic belief in the fatherhood of God, for example, is sure ground for the ethical belief in the common brotherhood of man. Is that the kind of dogma to which Mr. Varmus objects?
In an article for The Tablet, I catalogued the danger that nothing in the intellectual training of the President (or of those most likely to advise him) would dispose him to question the increasingly shrill demands of scientism. This adoration of science apart from "dogma" is stunningly unscientific, leaping past a host of questions properly called philosophic, to reach a place where no human endeavor should lurk, the place beyond questioning. As my friend Leon Wieseltier once wrote, "There is not a chart in the world that can explain the role of charts in the world."
The news article in the Washington Post notes that Obama does not intend to call for the repeal of the Dickey-Wicker amendment prohibiting research on embryos directly, as opposed to research on cells derived from the embryos. The Director of Obama’s Domestic Policy Council, Melody Barnes, noted that "Congress will have to make a determination about how they want to deal with that." This remark calls to mind Hannah Arendt’s writings about the banality of evil. Barnes, in consummate bureaucratic fashion, is content to punt the issue elsewhere. Newsflash to Ms. Barnes: Experimenting on embryos, which many American citizens believe are very young children, is horrific and you did not react with horror. Shame on you.
Those of us who have supported the President, who were non-plussed by the reversal of the Mexico City policy on the grounds that gag rules are difficult to defend in a liberal polity, and have been ambivalent about the nomination of Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, must here draw a line. The President’s decision on stem cells, and the hubristic way it is being defended by his staff, is deeply disturbing. I do not expect to agree with anyone one hundred percent of the time, so I do not feel inclined to abandon my overall support for the administration. But, it is Strike One.
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I agree that this is strike 1. There are no competing rights to be taken into consideration. Indifference to the intentional destruction of human beings in embryonic form is appalling.
The problem, therefore, is not Dogma, but uninformed Dogma coming out of Rome. This has foreclosed involvement by Catholic ethicists who know the truth but are prevented from stating it because to do so would be the kind of disobedience that invites censure. To the extent that an uninformed dogma is considered unreformable is the extent to which Dogma as a whole will be considered irrelevant to policy.
One cannot call for banning this research on principle without calling for a ban on in vitro fertilization, which results in the deaths of tens of thousands of embryos every year--many more than will ever be affected by stem cell research. But even the vast majority of Catholics support the use of IVF to help families that could not otherwise have children. The IVF example serves to remind us that this issue is not as straight-forward as some commentators would have us believe.
FOCA will be next.
2. What does McCain have to do with this? To say that McCain promised to support embryonic stem cell research is like claiming that Obama and McCain had similar policies for Iraq. McCain didn't keep or remove our troops from Iraq because he didn't make it into office. Obama did, and he is continuing the war over there, and now making all of us pay for embryonic stem cell research.
3. Obama is lieing to us when he says that embryonic stem cell research is promising. No cures are currently in site, this is a waste of money when it could be spent on Adult and Cord stem cells which are yeilding cures TODAY.
4. "...so I do not feel inclined to abandon my overall support for the administration...." Huh? I understand that there is supposedly lots of positive things about this administration, but if killing innocent lives is not enough to withdraw support from an administration, what is?
"Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but underneath are ravenous wolves.
By their fruits you will know them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?
Just so, every good tree bears good fruit, and a rotten tree bears bad fruit.
A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a rotten tree bear good fruit.
Every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.
So by their fruits you will know them."
Mathew 7:15-20
Question: will strike three be the manditory requirement of all hospitals to perform abortions? This will force Catholic Hospitals to close. Mr. Winters as a Catholic Liberal how do you justify the Liberal devaluation of life.
By the way. Embronic embryonic stem cell research was available to the public sector to investigate this Obama decision just provides MY TAX payments to kill a child.
Strike One! Gasp!
We cannot know from the ground up when ensoulment occurs. We must rely on revelation from above. This is the Church's role. To which may be added the simply logical question: how does Mr. Bindner know when it does occur?
Instead of using the Encyclopedia Britannica as a serious reference book on the subject, he should look into the McGraw Hill Encyclopedia of Science. And especially in the article on "twinning".
It is a specious argument to use the development of twins to say that there cannot be one soul in the embryo because a second person might develope [almost immediately] afterwards.
And why can there not be a second soul? Is there something to prevent God from so acting? It is He after all Who creates the souls. We but procreate.
As a matter of simple logic, might it not be better to act as though there is a human person [no matter how small, a person's a person] in the embryo. The attempts to proclaim [as yet unrealized] benefits are gambling that there is not. That money is to be made from such experiments, speaks for itself.
[To my mind, the stem cell permission is, at least, strike two. Strike one was lifting the Mexico City ban. Now we have an example of the imperialism of the Yankee dollar at work].
Ensoulment is irrelevant and certainly NOT something that the embryologists could know. Just because twinning could occur says nothing about the possiblity of ensoulment. It is possible that ensoulment could occur at the moment that human life biologically occurs. Thus a fertilized egg could have a soul and at the moment of twinning the ''cloned'' twin could have a soul.
The fertilized egg IS human and IS alive. That IS science. If you kill it then you kill human life, regardless of the utilitarian benefit obtained from the tissue. I will continue to fight for basic human rights for ALL humans no matter how small and defenseless. It seems that the Democrats are only for the big guys!
Marie Rehbein, I disagree with your comments about the egg. This is not the ''beginning'' of each new person. The egg has only one set of chromosomes. Human life has two sets, as is found in the fertilized egg. I do agree that we should not experiment on human eggs and human sperm for other reasons.
I wrote that it was the egg that contains all the instructions. That would be the fertilized egg.
The unfertilized egg would only contain some potential instructions as would sperm. However, there has been some suggestion elsewhere that clones made by inserting the genetic instructions found in a skin cell into an unfertilized human egg would not be off limits though it would have the potential to develop into a person. I wished to include that as well by my choice of wording
''We all know that President Obama rescinded the Bush funding restrictions for ESCR. But that isn’t all he did today. He also rescinded Executive Order 13435 of June 20, 2007.''
Officials at StemTech Health Sciences were aiming for Stem Enhance sales of $100,000 in the first month. Which was a hearty goal in itself. Imagine their astonishment when the 1st month's sales totaled over $1,000,000 and it just keeps rising.http://www.phyl247.biz office 970-985-4076
Instead, Obama rescinded an executive order President Bush put into place funding adult stem cells and new research with iPS cells. The order was intended to ultimately fund research into alternatives" to destructive embryonic stem cell research such as altered nuclear transfer (ANT), "regression" (reverting differentiated cells into stem cells), and other methods. Bush could be said to have been ahead of his time since regression, also known as direct reprogramming, has taken off and the new induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are the talk of the scientific world.
Last November saw that huge advance in stem cell research when scientists announced they had found a way to produce the biological equivalent of embryonic stem cells without creating, using, or destroying any human embryos. It is shocking to see ESCR pursued with such tenacity when it has not been shown to produce ANY cures even in countries whose ideas of ethics are far more obnoxious than our own and where this research has been conducted for years. In fact, embryonic stem-cells have been some time and time again to have major immune system problems, that is why adult stem-cell research actually has lead to cures since they are using their own stem-cells.
So given we are able to completely sidestep all of the moral and ethical concerns about destroying human embryos and still have all that “scientific promise” of breakthrough cures, why do people chose to keep on destroying embryos and take away funding for promising and ethical research??
Don't let big word confuse you...
The fertilized egg IS human and IS alive. This ''potential life'' stuff is not science but a political phrase. Ensoulment is a religious concept. If you intentionally kill a fertilized egg then you intentionally kill human life (with or without a soul).
If Michael Bindner and Barach Obama find it morally acceptable to kill little humans then so be it (with the power of executive order). I, however, will continue to defend all human life no matter how small and no matter how defenseless and no matter how dependent on us big people.
If the cells are before cleavage, they could be cut in half and become twins. You could even remove a third, use them for research and implant the remainder and the remainder might become a child. In other words, they do not have many of the aspects of what could be considered a whole person. One critereon for being a "whole person" is that cutting off a piece leaves permanent damage. This is not the case before gastrulation. Potential human life is not a poltical term, by the way, it is a term used in natural law reasoning.
Just because it has become possible for scientists to involve themselves at a microscopic level in the process that was designed to allow human beings to come into earthly existence, does not mean that what they are doing is morally neutral.
Specifically, you seem to assume that it is morally neutral for the fertility specialist to create embryos in the laboratory. However, some of us believe that this is the first immoral act that has laid the foundation for all the subsequent immoral acts pertaining to the fate of human embryos.
Using natural law as a guide, the removal of eggs from their natural environment should have been the first moral hurdle. Given that removal could be followed by replacement such that the course of nature could continue, this hurdle could have been crossed. However, the second hurdle should have been how many embryos may be created from the eggs. It should have been morally compelling to create only as many embryos as nature would ever create for a couple of normal fertility, but no one ever considered it.
Had we addressed the morality of IVF at its beginnings, we would not be addressing the situation in which there are human embryos available for research, and the question would now be whether it is ethical to remove eggs from women and fertilize them in order to do experiments on them or with them.
I believe that the answer to that question would have been no, it is not ethical, not only because it is unethical to remove the eggs without the intent of putting them back, but because it is unethical to interfere with the normal course of development of a fertilized human egg.
Humans don't have little faces at that stage in their development. Having a face is not a criteria for being human (at least scientifically speaking).
Scientifically this research kills little one cell, two cell, or a few cell individual humans.
Call it what it is. You think it ok to kill these humans. I don't!
You have acknowledged that the embryo is living human tissue. Now, to what human individual does that tissue belong? Don't say "the mother's"; that's impossible because it is genetically distinct from her.
There really (really!) is no way around it: the embryo is a new human individual, and therefore killing him or her is equivalent to killing any other human being.
[And, of course, every human being has a soul. It would be a non sequitur to speak of 'the beginning of a new human life' and 'ensoulment' separately. As the Catechism says, "it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body" (365).]
Unlike others on this issue, I am not arguing that it is acceptable to sacrifice the lives of human beings for this research. That would be the crassest form of utilitarianism.
What I am stating is that at five days of development, the products of conception at the morella and blastocyst stage are not "beings" but tissue which might develop into human beings - and most likely won't, even if implanted. At this stage, the stem cells no more have a soul than the stem cells found in the blood I had drawn last week to test my cortisol levels.
Cathechism 365 is in agreement with Thomistic doctrine. It also cuts buth ways. When a soul is present, you can see its effect on the organism. This effect is not evident until after gastrulation, when the organism develops in a manner which shows the effect of the DNA of both parents. Prior to that point, only the maternal DNA effects development. The male DNA has not fully integrated, so the cells cannot be properly called an "organism" since they have no organization.
If it were not for the existence of leftover embryos from IVF, would we be having a debate over whether life begins at conception or gastrulation? The debate is whether it is moral to use these leftover embryos for other than their intended purpose.
One side argues that we could make an exception to the concern that we are destroying a unique human individual at a very early stage of development, and that we use these embryos, which we know will not be given a chance at life as we experience it, so that we might make life better for those among us who suffer.
The other side would argue that we can under no circumstances make an exception because doing so sends a message that we may use people for our own benefit if they are not in a position to object.
You, on the other hand, are making an argument that would advocate extracting eggs from women, randomly fertilizing them with sperm, so that we may use them for medical purposes because there is no moral question until gastrulation. This is an extreme position to take on the issue.
This is false! You are creating an arbitrary point in the development of a new individual. The ''male'' DNA is most certainly ''integrated'' prior to gastrulation. Single and multicell living human organisms exist prior to ''gastrulation''. Gastrulation is when those cells migrate.
Also the twinning argument is irrelevant. If a scientist can take one of my cells and clone a twin from my 42 y/o body then did I ever have a soul??? Just because I have a ''clone'' does not mean that I do not have a soul nor does it mean that my cloned twin does not have a soul. Natural twinning occurs and yes it is possible that the life prior to twinning had a soul AND the natural cloned twin has a soul.
A blastocyst is not an embryo. It is not developing, it is merely getting ready to develop. If you remove the chorion, the cells do not die (provided they are cultured). If you remove an embryo from the chorion after gastrulation, it will die. In other words, prior to gastrulation, it was not a "being".
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