Keeping Rogue Science Rogue

There has been a lot of tongue-biting by pro-lifers in connection with the most recent report of the President’s Council on Bioethics, Reproduction & Responsibility: The Regulation of New Biotechnologies. The report is formally unanimous, but a flurry of “personal statements” appended to it reveal the very sharp differences between members of the Council. Indeed, the differences are so very sharp, and members offer such conflicting interpretations of the report, that one has to wonder about the claim that it reflects a consensus.

Some pro-life leaders have publicly criticized the report, but most are holding their fire, in large part out of respect for Council members who signed it, such as Robert P. George, Mary Ann Glendon, Alfonso Gómez-Lobo, William Hurlbut, Gilbert Meilaender, and the chairman, Leon Kass. As is the way with statements aiming at consensus, ambiguities abound, allowing for contradictory interpretations. The techno-optimists, led by James Q. Wilson, suggest the report opens the way to the more expansive use of human embryos in stem cell and related research. William Cardinal Keeler, chairman of the Catholic bishops’ pro-life committee, protests that the report does precisely that. The Council recommends banning research on embryos older than ten to fourteen days. According to the Keeler statement, “The decisive fact is that human life is a continuum from the one-celled stage onward. Any cutoff point after this event is arbitrary—providing no principled reason not to extend the time limit for destructive research, once the precedent is established. We should not start down this road, but explore ways to discourage research that attacks any human life.”

In principle, the pro-life signers of the statement do not disagree with that. They point out, however, that proposals to ban all embryo research are, at present and in the foreseeable future, politically blocked. Moreover, they note,researchers have already started “down this road.” The Council’s recommendations would limit and regulate what is now unlimited and unregulated. It is important to note that—despite the spin put on it by some Council members—this report does not fudge or retract earlier positions taken by the Council; for instance a permanent ban on cloning to produce children and a four-year moratorium on cloning for embryo research. The Council also calls for a ban on, inter alia, producing embryos with human sperm and animal eggs, and vice versa; implanting human embryos into animals; buying, selling, or patenting human embryos; and conceiving a child whose father or mother is a dead embryo or aborted fetus.

Such things sound bizarre, and they are, but they are being done or are on the edge of being done. There are rogue technicians, driven by hubris and greed, who are willing to produce babies-to-order by any means. The Council’s purpose, in part, is to make sure they continue to be rogues, to prevent them from turning their activities into a lucrative industry. In a joint statement in the appendix, George and Gómez-Lobo write, “We are among the members of the Council who favor protecting human life from the very beginning by banning the use of living human embryos at any stage of development as disposable research material. Until this becomes politically feasible, we support efforts to accord as much protection as possible by limiting the number of days beyond which the law tolerates deliberate embryo killing. It is important to understand that the Council’s recommendation here is not to authorize embryo-destructive research up to a certain limit. It is only to prohibit such research beyond a certain limit.”

Is this a morally permissible—although eminently debatable—prudential judgment or is it cooperation in a great evil? I am inclined to believe it is the former, while having grave reservations about the wisdom of participating in a consensus statement representing a consensus so very thin and so very subject to dishonest manipulation. Keep in mind that the policy declared by President Bush in August 2001 covered only government-funded research. Under other auspices, the exploitation of embryos in stem cell and related research is unregulated, and Harvard and other institutions are devoting huge resources to establish their morally odious leadership in this area. The Council’s recommendations would not make lawful anything that is now unlawful, and they would make unlawful much that is now lawful. Once now-unregulated research is firmly established in practice, it is argued, it would be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to regulate it after the fact.

Reproduction & Responsibility contains other complicated proposals that require finely honed moral discernment and prudential judgments. But on the question of setting a ten-to fourteen-day limit on using embryos for research, a rough analogy suggests itself. If you negotiate with terrorists who you have every reason to believe will kill ten hostages, and you get them to agree to kill only three and let the others go, what is the accurate moral description of what you have done? Have you condoned the killing of the three, or have you succeeded in saving the seven? Such are the hard questions posed by our brave new world. An alternative, of course, is not to negotiate with terrorists. Are you then complicit in the killing of all ten? There are circumstances in which one can do nothing about a great evil except bear witness against it. Some of the Council members mentioned above are, I believe, acting in a way consonant with the teaching of Evangelium Vitae in trying to limit a great evil while working toward eliminating it. I have enormous respect for their moral wisdom and integrity. I hope they have done the right thing in signing on to Reproduction & Responsibility.