“Bioethics & Human Nature: Exploring Some Background Issues”Key West, Florida

Speaker:Dr. Gilbert Meilaender, Richard & Phyllis Duesenberg Professor of Christian Ethics, Valparaiso University; Member, President’s Council on Bioethics

Respondent:William Saletan, Chief Political Correspondent, Slate

MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Gilbert Meilaender is a renowned author, theologian and Christian ethicist. He is a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics. He studied at Princeton under Paul Ramsey, one of the early ethicists writing on bioethics, many years ago. Gil, thank you for coming.

DR. MEILAENDER: Thanks, Michael. When the Hastings Center was founded in 1969, it was the first bioethics think tank in the United States, and it planned research in four areas of concern: death and dying and, in general, overcoming the limits of our finite condition; behavior control, and the relation between human activities and the kind of happiness that follows upon them; genetic screening, counseling and engineering, which included questions about kinship, procreation and attitudes toward future generations; and population policy and family planning, which, at least implicitly, asked about the relation of our own time to future generations.

Now, if you add to that list explicit attention to moral problems raised by human experimentation, the list could still today serve as pretty much an accurate catalogue of the main concerns of bioethics. The reason these issues have been and continue to be central, and no doubt at least one of the reasons bioethics has been a matter of such lively public concern, is, I think, obvious: these topics are not driven by concern for public policy regulation, though they give rise to questions like that. Rather, they involve some of the most important aspects of our humanity and they raise very deep questions about what it means to be human.

I want to think with you about some of those background questions — the questions behind the standard questions. And in order to do that I’m going to explore — without, for the moment, attempting to resolve — four questions about our humanity that I think almost inevitably arise when you begin to think

about the kinds of concerns that bioethics raises. These are the four I’ll take up: first, the unity and integrity of the human being; second, human finitude and freedom; third, the relation between the generations; and fourth, suffering and vulnerability.

First, the unity and integrity of the human being. The beginning of wisdom in bioethics may lie in the effort to think about what human beings are and why it matters morally. From several different angles, medical advance and research advance have tempted us to lose sight of any sense in which the embodied human being is an integral, organic whole.

In our age of rapid advances in genetic knowledge, an analogous image has been used to characterize our humanity. Here’s a passage from the biologist, Thomas Eisner: “As a consequence of recent advances in genetic engineering, [a biological species] must be viewed as…a depository of genes that are potentially transferable. A species is not merely a hard-bound volume of the library of nature; it is also a loose-leaf book, whose individual pages, the genes, might be available for selective transfer and modification of other species.”

To think of a book that way is to ignore the presence of an authorial hand. It would treat a book as if it were just the sum of a number of words, sentences, or paragraphs. We might try to think of human beings, or the other animals, in the same way, and, indeed, we are often invited to think of them that way, as collections of genes or as collections of organs possibly available for transplant. And of course, that’s very powerful in certain respects; it accomplishes certain things. But we might also wonder whether doing so begins to lose a sense of ourselves as integrated, organic wholes. That’s the first way in which the integrity of the human being is being questioned.

Even if we think of the human being as an integrated organism, the nature of its unity remains puzzling in a second way. The seeming duality of person and body has played a significant role in bioethics. Indeed, there’s a dissertation waiting to be written on the rise of the term “personhood,” which nobody really used 30 years ago. As that language of personhood gradually has come to prominence in bioethical reflection, attention has often been directed to circumstances in which the duality of body seems especially pronounced. Suppose a child is born, for instance, who, throughout his life, will be profoundly retarded, or suppose an elderly woman has now become severely

demented. Suppose because of trauma a person lapses into a permanent vegetative state. How shall we describe such human beings? Is it best to say that they are no longer persons — even if living human beings — or is it more revealing to describe them as severely disabled persons? Similar questions arise with embryos and fetuses. Are they human organisms that have not yet attained personhood, or are they the weakest and most vulnerable of human beings?

Related questions arise when we think of conditions that are often, even if controversially, regarded as disabilities. Perhaps, for instance, those who are deaf and have learned to sign create and constitute a culture of their own, what we call a manualist as opposed to an auralist culture. If so, one might argue that they are disabled only in an auralist culture, just as those who hear would be disabled if placed in the midst of a manualist culture. So long as the deaf are able to function at a high level within that manualist culture, you might ask, what does it matter in what way they function? Notice that the harder we press questions like that, the less significant becomes any normative human form. A head or a brain might be sufficient if it could find ways to carry out at a high level the functions that we think are important.

Such puzzles are inherent in the human condition, and they are sufficiently puzzling that we may struggle to find the right language in which to discuss that aspect of the human being which cannot be reduced to body. Within the unity of the human being a duality remains, and I will here use the language of “spirit” to gesture toward it. I’m not sure, actually, what the best language is. But as embodied spirits, or inspirited bodies, we stand at the juncture of nature and spirit, and are therefore tempted by reductionisms of various sorts. We have no access to the spirit — the person — apart from the body, which is the locus of personal presence; yet we are deeply ill at ease in the presence of a living human body from which all that is personal seems absent. We would be very reluctant, indeed, to bury that body while its heart still beat. We’d like that heart to stop before we did that.

In any case, the problems of bioethics force us to ask what a human being really is and, in doing so, to reflect upon the unity and integrity of the person. We must think about the moral meaning of the living human body, whether it exists simply as an interchangeable collection of parts, whether it exists merely as a carrier for something else that counts — whatever we call that; the realm of the personal or the spirit or whatever — whether a living human

being who lacks cognitive, personal qualities is no longer one of us or is simply the weakest and most needy one of us.

So that’s my first take. Now, my second angle, which I said was about finitude and freedom.

Using some very old religious language, we might say that, given the duality of our nature, we can go wrong in either of two ways: pride or sloth. Pride didn’t mean sort of a little harmless vanity and sloth didn’t mean a little laziness. Pride meant the attempt to be all freedom, acknowledging no limits to our creativity, supposing that our wisdom is sufficient to master the world. And sloth meant a kind of timid fear of freedom, ignoring the lure of new possibilities. Either of these is a denial of something essential to our humanity. It’s a reduction of the full meaning of our humanity.

The duality of body and person is related to what we may call a duality of finitude and freedom, because the human being is the place where these meet. There’s a kind of two-sidedness to our nature, and you can always look at a human being from each of these angles, and in a certain sense, you must look at a human being from both of them.

Drop me from the top of a 50-story building — there have been students who have contemplated that — and the law of gravity takes over, just as it does if we drop a stone from there. And that’s because we are finite beings. We’re located in space and time; we’re subject to natural necessity. But we are also free, able within some limits, perhaps, sometimes to transcend nature and history. So as I fall from that 50-story building, there are truths about my experience that cannot be captured by an explanation in terms of mass and velocity. Something different happens in my fall than in the rock’s fall, for this falling object is also a subject characterized by self-awareness. I can know myself as a falling object, which means that I can to some degree distance myself from that object. I cannot simply be equated with it. I am that falling object, yet I am also free from it.

As with nature, so also with history. I am the person constituted by the story of my life. I cannot simply be someone else with a different history. Yet I can also, at least to some degree, step into another’s story, see the world as it looks to that person — and thus be free from the limits of my history. Indeed, if we couldn’t do that, a virtue like justice would be impossible. The crucial question, of course, is whether there is any limit to such free self-

transcendence — whether we are, in fact, wise enough and good enough to be free self-creators, or whether we should acknowledge destructive possibilities in a freedom that knows no limit.

Understanding our nature in this way, we can appreciate how hard it may be to evaluate advances in medicine, claims about the importance, or even obligatoriness, of research, attempts to enhance our nature in various ways, or efforts to master aging and death. On the one hand, if we simply oppose the forward thrust of scientific medicine, we will not honor human freedom. And my standard example is that you go to the dentist and you appreciate that somebody didn’t rest content in a world without Novocain, or even with just that little speed drill. It was all there was when I was young. So the zealous desire to know and to probe the secrets of nature, to combat disease — all that is an expression of the human freedom from the given. And it’s to be honored. Yet, of course, if we can never find reason to stop in this restless attempt at mastery — if the only vice would be sloth and not also pride — then we may fail to honor the finite limits of our wisdom and our virtue, and it may even trivialize freedom to think of it as limitless.

There is probably no cookbook that gives the recipe for knowing how best to honor, simultaneously, both our freedom and our finitude. That there ought to be limits to our freedom does not mean that we can very easily state them in advance. But a truly human bioethics will recognize not only the creative but also the destructive possibilities in the exercise of our freedom. That’s my second angle.

My third topic is the relation between the generations. Because we are not only free but are also embodied spirits, the biological bond that connects the generations has moral meaning for us. We occupy a fixed place in the generations of humankind. Both Jews and Christians inculcate a command that calls upon us to honor our father and our mother. It is a puzzling duty, as all of us realize at a certain moment in our life: a duty to show gratitude for a bond in which we find ourselves without ever having freely chosen it. And we’re not actually very fond of bonds like that in our world. And it’s also true that insofar as it makes sense to talk, as I will in a moment, of the child as a gift, we might say that father and mother have also not chosen this precise bond. They too simply find themselves in it. A truly limitless freedom to make and remake ourselves, to pursue our projects in the world, would divorce us — potentially divorce us — from the lines of kinship and descent that locate

and identify us. So we’d have to ask ourselves whether that would be the fulfillment of our nature or an alienation from it.

It is, I think, fair to say that several different aspects of medical advance — in reproductive technologies, in psychopharmacology, in genetic screening, one day perhaps in techniques for genetic enhancement or cloning — these various kinds of advance have made it more difficult for both parents and children simply to honor and affirm the bond between the generations and to accept as a gift the lines of kinship that locate and identify them.

Our desire may be not simply for a child but for a child of a certain kind: a certain sex, with certain characteristics or capacities. Human cloning, were it possible, would from one angle bring to completion this image of the next generation as a product of rational will, undertaken to fulfill our desires. From another angle, of course, cloning might be thought to break entirely the bond between the generations, since in the instance of cloning we really do not even know how to name the relation between progenitor and offspring.

Pondering how best to think about the relation between the generations, we are driven once again to questions about when we should use our freedom to seek mastery or control and when, by contrast, we should accept certain limits inherent in human bodily life. The twentieth century began with considerable confidence in the possibility for eugenic control of the relation between the generations. That confidence suffered eclipse just after mid-century in the face of revelations of Nazi eugenic experiments, but it has reemerged in a lot of different ways. Today — probably, at least, in a country like ours — any state-sponsored eugenic ideology would surely face considerable opposition. But what we’ve done instead — to use the barbarous locution now common — is we’ve “privatized” what are essentially eugenic decisions.

Now, here again, there is no simple recipe for making decisions. Parents must exercise reason and will to shape their children’s lives. It would be irresponsible not to do that. Parents do not and should not simply accept as given whatever disabilities, sufferings, or even simply disappointments come their children’s way. Still, as every child realizes at some point, the conscientious parent’s effort to nurture and enhance can be crushing. It can make it very difficult simply to accept the child who has been given; impossible to say, “It’s good that you exist.”

The implication for the bond between the generations becomes still more far-reaching when we consider that research may make possible alteration of the human germline. More than 50 years ago, without any precise knowledge of such possibilities at all, C. S. Lewis contemplated such eugenic efforts. He wrote, “What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.” Alterations in the human germline, were they to become possible, would in one way be an awesome exercise of human freedom — really stunning in a way — and if used in the struggle against disease might promise, over time, a cure not only for some individuals’ suffering but, in a certain sense, for the species, with respect to one disease or another. Yet at the same time, the exercise of freedom is also a tremendous exercise of power. And just as synchronically parents need to allow the mystery of humanity to unfold in the lives of their children, so also diachronically one generation needs to allow others their freedom. How we sort out these competing goods will reveal much about what we understand the character of human life to be.

And my fourth category: suffering and vulnerability.

Part of the sadness of human life is that we sometimes cannot and other times ought not do for others what they fervently desire. With respect to the relief of suffering, the great quest of modern research medicine, this is certainly true, I think. Some relief we are simply unable to provide. That’s a fact that only gives greater impetus to our efforts to discover causes and cures. It is precisely the fact of our inability in the face of suffering that fuels what Daniel Callahan has called the “research imperative,” of which we are of course all the beneficiaries. But it’s important to ask how overriding this “imperative” is — whether it’s really an imperative; whether there are means to the possible relief of suffering which we ought not take up, and whether it would be good if we were not vulnerable to suffering. We need to ask those questions.

The quest for health (or it sometimes seems to be Health with a capital H) — the attempt to master nature in service of human need and to refuse to accept the body’s vulnerability to suffering — has characterized the modern period. And a great deal of good, of course, has come from that. The research that makes such gains possible is greatly to be desired. The question is, is it also imperative? Many questions of bioethics, especially questions about research,

invite us to try to determine the difference between the desirable and the imperative.

One of the now-classic essays in bioethics, first published in 1969, was Hans Jonas’s “Philosophical Reflections on Experimenting With Human Subjects.” Jonas articulated right at the very outset of the development of bioethics a difference between the desirable and the imperative. He noted that it is sometimes imperative that a society avoid disaster; so we conscript soldiers to fight. The fact that we do not ordinarily conscript experimental subjects indicates that, however much we value the improvements to life made possible by medical research, we do not think of ourselves as having an obligation to make such improvements. Research brings betterment of our life; it does not save our society.

Because this is true, we seek volunteers, not conscripts, in the cause of medical progress. And because this is true, far from using those who might be most readily available as handy research subjects, we should be most reluctant to use them. Indeed, Jonas defended what he called “the inflexible principle that utter helplessness demands utter protection.” That is, the vulnerability that ought to concern us most is not our own vulnerability to illness and suffering but, rather, the vulnerability of those whose very helplessness might make them seem all too readily available to us — all too near at hand — in our never-ending struggle to make progress. If “utter helplessness demands utter protection,” we will have to ask ourselves whether it is right to build our medical progress upon the sacrificed lives of those such as, for instance, so-called spare embryos, who seem expendable because doomed to die anyway.

Finally, we must also ask ourselves whether there might be research that is neither imperative nor desirable. If goodness is to be prized more than happiness, the endless quest to remake and enhance human life, to overcome vulnerability, may destroy other, equally important goods in an authentically human life. We recognize this truth, for example, in our role as parents. Conscientious parents want with all their heart to give their children what those children want — to try to make them happy. They also know, however, that some goods simply cannot be given but must be developed and achieved in the child’s own life. We cannot simply give our children the happiness that comes from finding a vocation, a spouse, or inner strength. We can’t provide that. Trying to give such goods would, in effect, subvert and

undermine them. So too we have to ask whether there might be research aims which, however well-intentioned, would seek to bestow traits of character and skill that have no value apart from the process through which they are developed and achieved. We are, that is, forced to ask hard questions about projects aimed at doing what we have come to call “enhancing” human nature.

Where do these reflections lead? Bioethics directs our attention to “bios” — to human bodily life in all its vulnerability and with all the goods that characterize it. For that life we seek health. In that life we seek to avoid suffering. These are great goods, but they may sometimes compete with other goods. A few times and places, avoiding such suffering may seem imperative; at many times and places it’s surely going to seem desirable; in some times and places, because we judge other, competing goods to be even more fundamental to human life, it may be neither imperative nor desirable.

Finally, when Jean-Jacques Rousseau published what we now call his “First Discourse,” discussing whether the arts and sciences had contributed to the betterment of human life, he chose as its frontispiece an image of Prometheus bringing fire to the Earth. And on the frontispiece, to a satyr standing nearby who reaches out to embrace and kiss the fire, Prometheus says, “Satyr, you will mourn the loss of the beard on your chin, for it burns when touched.” Fire brings light and warmth, making possible all the useful arts and sciences that enhance human life, but it burns if you get too close and embrace it.

The exercise of human freedom through scientific advance is a great benefit, but we need to find a safe way to gain those benefits without simultaneously getting burned. But there is, I think, a certain danger in allowing ourselves to read the myth only in this way, because read in this way, the story of Prometheus tends to hold up before us a yellow light — not green, since after all we all know the myth, we know the dangers involved in the exercise of human freedom, and we would not want to be characterized by hubris, so we wouldn’t just hold up a green light. But also not red, since, after all, the scientific and technological advance gained through the exercise of human freedom brings great good and we want to garner its benefits.

And what does a yellow light mean? A yellow light means proceed with caution. That is to say, keep on going; keep on proceeding; don’t stop, and moreover, do so with a very good conscience because we know that we’re being cautious, thoughtful and morally concerned. We read the story of

Prometheus. We know the dangers of Promethean hubris. People like that never find a good enough reason to stop.

Now, quite often, of course, proceeding with caution is perfectly sound advice. I wouldn’t dispute that at all. But it may give us all too good a conscience about our mastery of nature. It never suggests that we should do anything other than continue to advance. But if we really want to be morally serious, the ability to stop, to decline to go forward, may also sometimes be needed, and I don’t think that real moral seriousness is possible unless we at least acknowledge such possibilities, not just in theory but also in practice.

MR. CROMARTIE: Well, thank you, Gil. Next we’ll hear from our respondent, Will Saletan, who writes on this all the time. Will is also an author of a book called Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War, which got a lot of attention and still does in the current debates.

WILLIAM SALETAN: Thanks, Michael. I thought maybe what I could do is take some of the ideas that Gil talked about and apply them to the foreground, to current events and to politics, and basically I’m going to try to do a little philosophy and then gross everybody out.

I want to pick up on two points that Gil made in his talk. The first one is the perils of exploiting the helpless to serve our own medical needs, and second is the notion that we can just plow ahead with any scientific project because we know that we’re being cautious, thoughtful and morally concerned. These are phrases that we hear a lot in politics. This was the first presidential campaign in which biotechnology, and specifically embryonic stem-cell research, became a top-tier mainstream campaign issue. John Kerry talked about it routinely at campaign stops. His campaign devoted two major speeches and two of his weekly radio addresses to it. The Kerry campaign did an ad about it. They featured it at the Democratic Convention.

Why did they do this? Basically because stem-cell research, unlike abortion, is a huge political winner for them. The Kerry campaign was very proud to send around their polling showing that 69 percent of Americans supported embryonic stem-cell research. They broke it down by Republicans and independents as well. And obviously these numbers are different from, say, the abortion debate.

So why is stem-cell research, unlike abortion, such a big political winner for them? The answer is basically that it scores higher in a utilitarian calculus. Michael Kinsley wrote in The New Republic last month:

“Abortion doesn’t fully test the premise that human life and moral equality with every other human life begin at conception. On one side you have a fetus, several weeks or months along from conception, with perhaps the beginnings of real human characteristics: tiny arms and legs, rudimentary brains. On the other side you have something serious at stake for an indisputable human being [the woman], but it’s usually something less than life….The stem-cell controversy is different. On one side is not a fetus some distance along the way to birth, but an embryo just days after conception. You need a microscope to see it….This time human life is at stake on the other side, and not just a single human life, but potentially many if stem-cell research realizes its potential.”

Now, there’s a crucial fallacy in this argument, and it’s a fallacy that many liberals and conservatives are falling prey to, and that is that not all morality can be reduced to quantifying and weighing things against each other. The argument for the right to abortion is not just that the woman outweighs the fetus but that the fetus is inside the woman. It’s an argument for autonomy. It doesn’t say the rights of some other woman outweigh the life of the fetus; it says the rights of this woman outweigh the fetus because she is the one in whom the fetus resides.

But the argument for embryonic stem-cell research is fundamentally different. The embryo that would theoretically be killed to save somebody’s life is not inside that person’s body. That person has no autonomy claim over the embryo. It’s purely a utilitarian argument, and it says that you can end one life because another life is mathematically more important.

And here’s the crucial thing about these two principles: autonomy is an inherently limited principle. You’re only entitled to kill the fetus in your own body. So on this principle it would take millions of women to kill millions of fetuses, and if you’re a fetus, only one person has the right to kill you. Utility is an inherently unlimited principle. If one life is more important than another life, anyone has the right to take the first life to save the second. Everything is fair game and nothing is sacred.

Now, the most disturbing thing about the stem-cell debate is that people on both sides of the abortion debate, who came into the abortion debate as defenders of individual rights, either the rights of the woman or the rights of the fetus, are joining forces in the stem-cell debate, not as defenders of individual rights but as advocates of utility. Let me give you two examples.

This is a memo from NARAL Pro-Choice America from November 16: “We were also pleased that California passed its ballot initiative funding stem-cell research, a clear repudiation both of Bush’s policy in that area and the anti-choice premise that embryos deserve legal protection over and above all other interests.” NARAL is very happy that the initiative passed because they want to drive down the value of the embryo so that in the context of abortion the embryo won’t trump the woman. They’re looking at it in utilitarian terms, not caring or paying attention to the fact that this calculus would also apply in other contexts.

Now, what happened in 2004, both in the presidential race and in the campaign for Proposition 71 in California, for embryonic stem-cell research, was the debut of this utilitarian argument as a very powerful campaign message. John Kerry said in an ad on October 4: “There’s no time to wait. At stake are millions of lives.” Kerry made the argument very clear in economic terms as well. Here’s what he said in a speech in Denver on June 21: “By supporting stem-cell therapy…not only can we reduce the economic cost of health care, we can reduce the emotional and social cost to families.”

What’s going to limit these utilitarian pursuits? What principle is going to stop them from running amok? President Bush said August 2001, shortly after he decided not to fund research on future embryonic stem-cell lines: “The ethics of medicine are not infinitely adaptable. There is at least one bright line. We do not end some lives for the medical benefit of others.” Now, that is a direct repudiation of the utilitarian principle when it comes to destruction of life.

What did John Kerry say about that line? Here’s what he said in a speech in October in Ohio. He said, “By blocking stem-cell research, President Bush has sacrificed science to ideology.” Now, “ideology” was basically Kerry’s word for morality with teeth — morality that might get in the way of science.

So what was Kerry’s solution to the danger of utilitarianism run amok? Well, his answer was what Gil Meilaender warned against: Kerry promised to be cautious, thoughtful and morally concerned. He said, “We need to tear down

every wall today that keeps us from finding the cures of tomorrow. I have full faith that our scientists will go forward with a moral compass, with humane values and sound ethics guiding the way. If we pursue the limitless potential of science and trust that we can use it wisely, we will save millions of lives.” So basically Kerry said, “Science will provide its own ethics; science, medicine and technology will limit themselves. We’re all good, reasonable people.”

So let’s see whether that’s true. I’m going to go through a series of news reports from the past four years about new utilitarian frontiers in biotechnology. So listen to each one and ask yourself a question that Gil was asking at the end of his talk: where will science, technology and the principle of utility stop, and where will you stop?

Substituting humans for animals in research for the sake of utility. This is from the New York Times, August 4, 2004: “Researchers at the University of Munich repeated the experiment 70 times. A healthy volunteer would receive a chemical injection and then be left alone to ride out an artificially induced panic attack. From the next room, doctors watched the volunteers’ restlessness via video camera, measured the quickening pulse and rise in blood pressure, and used an intercom to question the person about his or her feelings of impending doom...In the past, many of the tests might have been done only on animals….Scientists and industry executives, while acknowledging the potential for ethical issues, say that experiments on people are more reliable because animal tests often fail to accurately predict whether a drug will work on people.” Makes sense, right?

Now let’s go on and talk about weeding out embryos for minor defects. This is from the New York Times, June 20, 2004. This is an article on the use of, quote, “the wider range and earlier timing of prenatal tests.” “Dr. Jonathan Lanzkowsky, an obstetrician affiliated with Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, described one woman who had been born with an extra finger….Detecting the extra digit through early ultrasound, she has terminated two pregnancies so far….Other doctors said they had seen couples terminate pregnancies for poor vision whose effect they had witnessed on a family member, or a cleft palate.”

Let’s go on to weeding out embryos that are not defective but carry a gene that might cause a nonfatal defect in a future generation. This is from the Washington Post, July 14, 2003: “Australian fertility doctors say they have

used a genetic test to screen out embryos that carried a gene for deafness — the first-known instance of pre-selecting embryos to eliminate a non-life threatening trait….Some of the embryos initially screened out would not turn out to be deaf but would only have carried a gene that increased the odds of having deaf offspring.”

Weeding out embryos because they’re female — everyone knows this is going on. The Washington Post, December 2, 2002. “[In] a fertile farming state just west of New Delhi…the 2001 census found just 820 girls for every thousand boys among children under age six. The lopsided sex ratio reflects the spread of modern medical technology, particularly ultrasound exams, which allow Indian couples to indulge a cultural preference for sons by using abortion to avoid having girls”

Let’s go on to creating and then weeding out embryos for medical utility. The Washington Post, June 30, 2001: “Molly Nash, six, who was dying of Fanconi Anemia, had an inherited blood disease. Her parents had set out to create a sibling bone marrow donor for Molly, undergoing four cycles of in vitro fertilization to make a total of 30 embryos with Lisa’s eggs and Jack’s sperm. Using technology largely developed by scientists in Illinois tested one cell from each of the 30 embryos and found that five of the embryos were free of the diseased gene and also perfect tissue type matches for Molly….Lisa gave birth to a boy, Adam. Soon after he was born, doctors transfused some of his blood cells into Molly’s veins.” Okay, so five of them were both matches. Presumably, some larger number were free of the diseased gene but didn’t match her, and they chucked those.

Let’s now take the same scenario but this time there’s no screening for an inherited disease. The embryos are going to be weeded out purely for utility. This is from The Associated Press, May 5, 2004. “A Chicago laboratory helped create five healthy babies through in vitro fertilization so they could serve as stem-cell donors for their ailing brothers and sisters. The infants were screened and selected when they were still embryos to make sure they would be compatible donors…. The Chicago doctors said the healthy embryos that were not matches were frozen for potential future use, but some ethicists said such perfectly healthy embryos could end up being discarded.”

Now, let’s go on to a couple of things about markets. Markets in eggs. This is from the Washington Post, 2002. “Women who donate their eggs for in vitro fertilization are paid as much as $75,000 in some areas of the country.” Money is changing hands for eggs.

From the Associated Press, June 1, 2003: “[A] coalition of surgeons, academics, religious leaders and activists…wants a 1984 law prohibiting financial incentives for organ donations” — that’s in the United States — “to be rewritten to allow a project that would award $5,000 to families who authorize a deceased relatives organs to be used for transplantation….’ It would just greatly increase the number of organs that are donated,’ Harold Kyriazi, a University of Pittsburgh neuroscientist who organized the group, said” — there’s the utilitarian argument. You can feel us getting to the bottom of this slippery slope.

Killing prisoners for organs. This is the New York Times, November 11, 2001. “Kidneys, livers, corneas and other body parts from executed Chinese prisoners are being transplanted into American citizens or permanent residents who otherwise would have had to wait years for organs….Few of the condemned, if any, consent to having their organs removed” — beforehand — “people involved with the process say. Some of the unwitting donors may even be innocent, having been executed as part of a surge of executions propelled by accelerated trials and confessions that sometimes were extracted through torture….This year, 5,000 prisoners or more are likely to be put to death during a nationwide anti-crime drive….Taiwan also harvests organs from executed prisoners, albeit with strict consent requirements, as do some South American countries.”

Okay, and now we are at the bottom of the slippery slope, which, as you all know, is killing babies. This is from National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” five days ago, December 1: “A hospital in the Netherlands has begun carrying out mercy killings of terminally ill newborns. Doctors there have reported euthanizing four babies last year. The main doctors’ organization has asked the Dutch government to create an independent board to review euthanasia cases for people with ‘no free will,’ specifically children, people who are severely mentally retarded, and people left in an irreversible coma after an accident. Dr. Eduard Verhagen is clinical director of the pediatric clinic of

University Hospital Groningen in the Netherlands.” He tells NPR, ” ‘In extreme cases, the best way to protect life is to sometimes assist a little bit in death.’ ”

And I’ll leave it at that.