Crossing the Line

I would love to join Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and many other conservatives who have decided to support federal funding for wide-ranging research in a hugely promising new area – embryonic stem cells. I’d love to, but I can’t.Stem cells can be made to generate nearly any type of human tissue, including types that might cure disease and save lives. They are taken from human embryos that are destroyed in the process. But the results might help alleviate horrific human suffering.In 2001, the Bush administration sponsored legislation to allow federal funding of stem cell research. But funded research was restricted to the stem cell colonies in existence at that time. Frist and others would expand funding to cover new stem cell lines created from frozen embryos left over from fertility treatments, embryos that would otherwise be discarded. (It’s possible that new techniques could yield stem cells without destroying embryos, but those techniques are still experimental.)Why would anyone oppose Frist’s new position? Because embryos are potential infants just as infants are potential adults. The human embryo is a tightly closed bud that will bloom one day if we let it. The difference between bud and blossom is only luck and time. If it seems OK to destroy embryos but not full term fetuses, that’s only because embryos look less human. The distinction rests not on justice but on squeamishness.But this isn’t my reason for opposing expanded stem cell funding. I am willing, in principle, to lean on a distinction that is made in the Talmud between “potential” life (such as embryos) and actual life outside the womb. Both must be protected; but actual life ranks higher. If there were nothing more to consider, I’d be willing to use doomed embryos to search for life-saving new technologies. Reality often forces us to choose between imperfect alternatives.But to go down that road, I must be able to trust the American public to draw a line and forbid science to step over it.The doomed frozen embryos Frist is eyeing were created with no thought of mining them for stem cells. But the obvious next step might be to let scientists breed embryos specifically for research, or buy them from dealers. To support Frist, you must be sure that Americans will never permit these ghastly next steps.Why “ghastly”? Because we can never permit the creation of human life with the intent of using and then killing it. We have no right to construct a world in which two kinds of human embryo exist, one immeasurably precious and the other designed to be cut up for parts. We’d be turning “all men are created equal” into the ugliest kind of lie. (The Talmud, for its part, never allows potential life to be destroyed without a specific, powerful reason.)Can we trust the American public to forbid the creation of disposable human life? Can we trust ourselves to forbid the premeditated destruction of weak and helpless potential human beings?No, and the Terri Schiavo case proves it.Schiavo was weak, helpless, gravely brain damaged, “dimly wakeful,” unable to feed herself – but not dying. Her parents loved her, and she (they believed) continued to love them.Yet various courts ruled at her husband’s request that her life wasn’t worth living. And so her caregivers were ordered to stop feeding her. “Even a chip of ice to relieve the pain of a parched mouth and throat was judicially prohibited,” wrote Dr. Paul McHugh in Commentary magazine, “and local sheriffs were alerted to prevent it.” She died slowly of dehydration. Surveys suggested that the American public didn’t care to interfere, and disapproved of politicians who tried to.Can this same public be trusted to tell the biomedical establishment “this far and no further”? Of course not. When hard moral judgments were required, whatever the “experts” said was good enough for us. We refused to interfere and draw a line. And so we have no right to allow science to set off down this road.I have permanent, debilitating injuries that stem cell research might conceivably help. But rejecting research that might help you personally is dirt-easy compared to rejecting research that might help a suffering family member. When Americans campaign for unrestricted stem cell research out of despairing love, I can’t blame them any more than I can blame Terri Schiavo’s parents for pleading for their daughter’s life.How much do our moral scruples really matter to us in the end? An agonizing question. But I can’t line up with Frist, much as I would like to.Mr. Gelernter is a professor of computer science at Yale University and a contributing editor of the Weekly Standard.

Crossing the Line

Crossing the Line

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