Protecting Life from New Challenges

At the ACLJ, we are fortunate to have law student Kim Shaftner, M.D. serving as a medical-legal fellow and studying to receive his J.D. from Regent University School of Law in 2009.  Dr. Shaftner has written a very important article on the issue of human experimentation that I would like to share with you today.  It is especially timely as Congress is currently considering proposals on this topic.  Dr. Shaftners editorial is as follows:

 

         Consider this scenario:  In the course of fertility treatments, your wife or daughter donates unused eggs for use in research.  A laboratory combines the nuclei of the eggs with cells from a rabbit or cow.  Is this your long-desired childor grandchild? 

 

         This is not a theoretical proposition.  In the United Kingdom, the government now permits the creation of animal-human hybrids for scientific research.  This procedure involves injection of the nucleus of a human cell into an animal cell (cow or rabbit) whose nucleus has been removed. The resulting interspecies embryo is neither human nor animal, but instead man and beast combined into one.

 

         In late 2007, Britains Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) decided to license laboratory creation of such organisms.  The HFEA also considered mixing of human/animal eggs and sperm, the creation of animal embryos with human cells added, and human embryos with animal cells added in early development. 

 

         British Cardinal Keith OBrien addressed the issue in an Easter sermon delivered at the St. Marys Cathedral in Edinburgh.  Cardinal OBrien stated that legislation authorizing this research represents a monstrous attack on human rights, human dignity and human life, and that it creates governmental endorsement of experiments of Frankenstein proportions. 

 

         Such experimentation evokes the wisdom of repugnance in many Americansan intuitive and deep-seated negative response to ideas or practices that we should interpret as evidence for their harmful or evil character.  This notion, first described by ethicist Leon Kass, should serve to remind us that the public debate should not be devoid of moral participation and influence. 

 

         Governments in Germany, France, Italy, Canada, and Australia have already banned such grotesque procedures, citing ethical concerns.  Yet there is nothing that prevents this scenario from occurring in the United States.  In fact, the Democratic majority in Congress has been unable or unwilling to untangle this triple knot of morality, science, and politics.  Apparently dazzled by the pace of technological progress and by misleading promises of therapies and cures, they have relegated critical and thoughtful proposals to languish in committee.  Senator Sam Brownback has sponsored legislation to prohibit both human cloning and the creation of human-animal hybrids (S. 1036 and S. 2358), but neither bill is likely to see the light of day unless action is taken.

 

         Human cloning has already been accomplished by one private Californian corporation. There is absolutely no federal guidance to prevent human cloning for harvesting of organs or other body parts.  There is no legislation prohibiting hybridization between humans and animals.  Our mandate is to serve as the moral guard.  As Wesley Smith has noted, Science, as every human enterprise, needs ethical boundaries beyond which it should not go, and we have a right to decide what those proper parameters are.