Bioethics essay: "Direct Reprogramming & the End of Embryonic Research"

Welcome to this week's installment of my ongoing essay series about contemporary bioethics issues. As always, constructive feedback is welcome. Here is a list of the previous topics I've treated so far:

• “Did the Congo nuns get permission and set precedent?" (Nov. 1)
• "The Pope Speaks to Pharmacists ... and Connecticut?" (Oct. 29)
• "Long-Term Complications for Premature Infants" (Oct. 22)
• “The Evil Effects of Legalizing Euthanasia” (Oct. 10)
• “The Moral Implications of Artificial Wombs” (Oct. 1)
• “Mandatory Organ Donation Initiatives” (Sep. 26)
• “Human-Animal Hybrids and the Catholic Response” (Sep. 20)

This week's topic:

“Direct Reprogramming & the End of Embryonic Stem Cell Research”

I submit that a recent discovery made public in the last week has radically changed the landscape of the ethic stem cell debate and further precludes embryonic stem cell research.

The “direct reprogramming” of adult cells (such as skin cells, for instance) to a non-differentiated state, previously accomplished successfully in mice, has now been done in humans. Richard Doerflinger, director of pro-life activities for the USCCB, said that this discovery is “completely acceptable ethically and also perhaps more promising scientifically and medically than embryonic stem cells have been in the past.”[1] Currently, the technique involves disrupting the DNA of the skin cell, which could raise the probability of cancer. However, this DNA disruption is a “byproduct” and “experts said they believe it can be avoided.”[2] The technique is straightforward, with one person being quoted as saying “People didn't know it would be this easy … thousands of labs in the United States can do this, basically tomorrow.”

Direct reprogramming has two distinct technical advantages over cloning: it does not require a huge supply of unfertilized human egg cells and it does not bring into being (and later kill) a human person. Furthermore, it is eligible for federal funding under current law.[3] As a result of these and other benefits, such notable scientists as Ian Wilmut (who became a household name as the director of the research team that first successfully cloned a sheep and named it Dolly) have publicly abandoned cloning in favor of direct reprogramming research.[4]

Focusing research on the far-more-promising technique of direct reprogramming has been made more urgent by recent news that scientists have successfully cloned primates (again, previously up to this point the technique had primarily been used with mice).[5] The cloning process, in comparison with reprogramming, is plagued by inefficiency, and demands many unfertilized egg cells. Fr. Thomas Berg, director of the Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person, noted that the breakthrough is a “double-edged sword.”[6] On the one hand such research can provide insights into human biology. On the other hand, research must never cross the line into developing human cloning techniques carried-over from primate testing, he said.

The recent discoveries made in direct reprogramming, of course, do not change the fundamentally unethical nature of embryonic stem cell research. Human life cannot be weighed proportionally with possible future scientific benefits. The Catholic Church has consistently taught this truth. Most recently at the U.S. Bishops’ fall meeting in Baltimore they unanimously issued a new statement re-condemning stem cell research which involves the destruction of innocent nascent human life.[7] These recent discoveries do, however, discredit the argument put forward by proportionalists that embryonic human beings can be sacrificed for scientific progress, because their argument rests upon the premise that embryonic stem cell research is the most promising path towards deriving usable pluripotent stem cells. The first successful human tests of direct reprogramming all but definitively put the lie to their line of reasoning. +++

Bioethics essay: “Did the Congo nuns get permission and set precedent?"

Welcome to this week's installment of my ongoing essay series about contemporary bioethics issues. As always, constructive feedback is welcome. Here is a list of the previous topics I've treated so far:

• "The Pope Speaks to Pharmacists ... and Connecticut?" (Oct. 29)
• "Long-Term Complications for Premature Infants" (Oct. 22)
• “The Evil Effects of Legalizing Euthanasia” (Oct. 10)
• “The Moral Implications of Artificial Wombs” (Oct. 1)
• “Mandatory Organ Donation Initiatives” (Sep. 26)
• “Human-Animal Hybrids and the Catholic Response” (Sep. 20)

This week's topic:

“Did the Congo Nuns receive permission, and did that set an irreformable precedent?”

[Prompted by questions in this AmP comment thread.]

A recent debate concerning the use of contraceptives in rape protocols has brought up the often-cited case of the “Congo nuns.” As the story goes, nuns in the Belgian Congo during the 1960s were given permission by the Vatican to take contraceptives in situations were it was clear that guerilla soldiers might sack their convents and force themselves upon the sisters. This story is regularly used as a lower-level support of the now widespread practice (enshrined in the USCCB’s Ethical and Religious Directives #36) of allowing women who have been raped to be treated “with medications that would prevent ovulation, sperm capacitation, or fertilization.”

In 2001, for instance, a Spanish bishop stated that religious women living in places where they were in danger of being raped could legitimacy use oral contraceptives.[2] Fr. Brian Johnstone, a respected moral theologian at the Alphonsiana used the case of the Congo nuns as precedent for the Spanish bishop’s statement, saying that at the time when the permission was given it “was seen as a protection against pregnancy arising from unwanted, unfree sexual intercourse.” [3] Johnstone admited that the case is not well know, “but it’s there” he maintained. [4]

Efforts to objectively prove the existence of a dispensation to the Congo nuns yield frustratingly scant results. Buried deep in the Park Ridge Center’s Media Brief, for example, one finds a citation of an Associated Press article that claims Vatican officials described the Church’s action in the Congo as a “legitimate defense.” If this seems like tenuous third-hand hearsay, it is.

In The Encycical that Never Was: The Story of the Commission on Population, Robert Blair Kaiser makes the claim (in a footnote on p. 72) that the Spanish Jesuit Fr. Marcelino Zalba was “the first theologian to propose that the Vatican allow nuns in war-torn Congo to use the pill … [and] the Holy Office bought his suggestion.”[5] The claim is an interesting one considering that Fr. Zalba was a staunch supporter of Humanae Vitae [6] and a frequent-citer of Casti Cannubi.[7] In other words, he was hardly an individual one would suspect of trying to subvert the doctrinal teaching of the Church.

At the same time, however, Kaiser provides a fascinating account of Fr. Zolba’s reasoning on a related topic (p. 124): “[Fr Marcelino] Zalba believed that Pius XII had condemned the pill but, because he voiced this in a mere allocutio, Zalba did not consider this an irreformable conclusion.”[8] From this quotation it is evident that Fr. Zalba – himself the alleged proponent of the Congo nuns dispensation – did not take lower-level locutions by a pontiff (or one could also postulate, private letters from the Holy Office) as irreformable teaching! In fact the congo nuns exception – if it deed occurred - preceded the publication of Humanae Vitae in 1968. One could reasonably make the argument that Humanae Vitae overrules the low-level precedent set by the Vatican permission to the Congo nuns.

Digging still deeper, one finds that the most prominent figure to regularly bring up the case of the Congo nuns is none other than Vatican-censured theologian Charles Curran. [9] For the sake of completeness, Martin Rhonheimer mentions the Congo nuns case example in a footnote to his Objectivity of Human Action: Some Classic Problems, [10] saying that it was much discussed in the early 1960s, and that several moral theologians at the time had declared in an affidavit that the action of taking contraceptives by nuns in Congo missions was “morally acceptable.”

To conclude, the purpose of this treatment was not to call into question the teaching of the U.S. bishops in their Ethical and Religious Directives, but rather to point out that several reservations should accompany the use of the Congo nuns as a precedent for this teaching. As has been shown, there exists no readily-available documentation of the permission given by the Holy Office to the Congo nuns. Also, the Vatican has not referred back to it as a precedent when treating questions of a similar nature (although it is hard to definitively prove this negative claim). Finally, Fr. Zolba, the architect of the argument which the Holy See employed (if it did indeed grant the dispensation) would himself seem to not stand by the precedent absolutely. +++

Bioethics Essay: “The Pope Speaks to Pharmacists (and Connecticut?)”

Welcome to this week's installment of my ongoing essay series about contemporary bioethics issues. As always, constructive feedback is welcome. Here is a list of the previous topics I've treated so far:

• "Long-Term Complications for Premature Infants" (Oct. 22)
• “The Evil Effects of Legalizing Euthanasia” (Oct. 10)
• “The Moral Implications of Artificial Wombs” (Oct. 1)
• “Mandatory Organ Donation Initiatives” (Sep. 26)
• “Human-Animal Hybrids and the Catholic Response” (Sep. 20)

This week's topic:

“The Pope Speaks to Pharmacists (and Connecticut?)”

[In follow-up to this post.]

On Monday, October 29th, Pope Benedict addressed the 25th international congress of Catholic pharmacists who were in Rome to discuss the theme “the new frontiers of pharmaceutical activity.” In his speech, Pope Benedict re-affirmed three principles of Catholic medical moral theology that were recently challenged by new legislation in Connecticut:

1) In the English VIS bulletin, the Pope is quoted as saying that pharmacists must not “collaborate directly or indirectly in supplying products that have clearly immoral purposes such as, for example, abortion or euthanasia.” Elsewhere in the French version of the text, the Pope uses the phrase “la nidation d’un embryon” – literally, “the nidation of an embryo” (emphasis added). Nidation is a technical medical term which means “Implantation of the conceptus in the endometrium.”[1] The Italian text of the sentence reads “l'annidamento di un embrione” – again, “the nidation of an embryo.” The pope’s precise word use is significant because many commonly-proscribed “contraceptives” in fact act abortifaciently by preventing the nidation of an already-conceived embryo. Plan B is one of the drugs widely-believed to act abortifaciently by preventing nidation. Hospitals in Connecticut have recently been forced to proscribe Plan B to female victims of rape without an ovulation test.

2) Pope Benedict says that pharmacists have a “right” to conscientiously object in situations where they are asked to collaborate in supplying products which have immoral purposes such as abortion (including anti-nidation) or euthanasia. The recent legislation passed in Connecticut allows no such exemption for conscientious objection. Pharmacists must dispense the Plan B medication to all victims of rape regardless of whether they have undergone an ovulation test and so – presumably – in these cases Plan B might act abortifaciently instead of contraceptively. Here again, the Pope is reaffirming general principles of Catholic medical moral theology which have recently been directly challenged by this particular legislation.

3) Pope Benedict states that one of the duties of pharmacists is to fulfill their obligation of educating patients about “the correct use of medications” as well as by informing them of “the ethical implications of the use of particular drugs.” While at first glance this admonition might strike one as a logical accompaniment to the Pope’s main thesis, the fact that it is explicitly stated anyway could be significant because the Connecticut legislation also violates this principle. In what seems like a paradoxical legal precedent, caregivers of women who have been raped are not allowed the full testing and council that medicine has to offer. Instead, priority of place is given to the administration of Plan B to the point that it may be administered when it could have no tangible effect (contraceptive or abortifacient). In such cases, a placebo would be as effective in alleviating psychological trauma. Furthermore, the high concentration of chemicals present in Plan B, from an objective standpoint, is a needless treatment in cases where the dosage can have no effect in preventing or terminating a pregnancy.

Pope Benedict further demonstrates in his speech that he is aware that medical decisions made by pharmacists do not exist in a moral or cultural vacuum. He concludes that “The biomedical sciences are at the service of man… Were it otherwise they would be cold and inhuman. All scientific knowledge in the field of healthcare ... is at the service of sick human beings, considered in their entirety, who must have an active role in their cure and whose autonomy must be respected.” Pope Benedict has provided in his speech to Pharmacists a comprehensive and pastoral vision of medical health care which also explains what properly inspires Catholic medical treatments. +++

Bioethics Essay: “Long-Term Complications for Premature Infants”

Welcome to this week's installment of my ongoing essay series about contemporary bioethics issues. As always, constructive feedback is welcome. Here is a list of the previous topics I've treated so far:

• “The Evil Effects of Legalizing Euthanasia”
• “The Moral Implications of Artificial Wombs”
• “Mandatory Organ Donation Initiatives”
• “Human-Animal Hybrids and the Catholic Response”

This week's topic:

"Long-Term Complications for Premature Infants"

One of the current debates in bioethics is whether or not it is permissible to induce the early delivery of an unborn child. Unfortunately, when considering the various good and bad effects of inducing labor prematurely, the question of “viability” is sometimes absolutized. While it is true that viability is normative for determining the legitimacy of any early induction, it is also true that the possibility of adverse long term side-effects must also be taken into account, especially when relative goods – such as physical comfort – are the reasons for inducing labor.

These facts are especially relevant to the debates as women more frequently decide to chemically-induce labor rather than have the inconvenience of carrying a child to full gestation.

Rob Stein, writing for the Washington Post (May 20, 2006) notes a sobering statistic: “The percentage of babies born slightly early has been increasing steadily for more than a decade and is now at an all-time high.” He then gives an explanation:

“The increase is driven by a combination of social and medical trends, including the older age of many mothers, the rising use of fertility treatments and the decision by more women to choose when they will deliver. At the same time, medical advances are enabling doctors to detect problem pregnancies earlier and to improve care for premature babies, prompting them to deliver more babies early when something threatens their lives or those of their mothers.”

These babies, he goes on to note, are more prone to a long list of potentially life-threatening complications. The statistics on the long-term effects of being born prematurely are still being gathered. After all, until recently most premature babies had a very poor chance of survival. As a result, only now have the “first generation” of premature babies begun to reach maturity. (In 2002, the largest study of extremely premature babies and their side-effects had been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, January 17th 2002. The children in this study were mostly born between 1977-79.)

While the viability point (normally defined, incidentally, as the point at which a child is at least 50% likely to survive) continues to require less gestation by the mother, Stein notes that “lungs, brains and other organs of babies born even a week or two early are often underdeveloped.” In addition to requiring the services of expensive “Neonatal Intensive Care”, these babies are “about five times as likely to die in the first week of life and about three times as likely to die in the first year than full-term babies.” A quotation from Steven B. Morse of the University of Florida sums-up the situation well: “The thinking had been that these babies were basically the same as term babies. Now it looks like they really are different."

Most long-term medical complications among premature infants have to do with higher brain function. A BBC article from 2003 notes that blindness, underdevelopment, learning difficulties and developing asthma are possible. The online encyclopedia provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and National Institute of Health adds many more possible complications, including “bleeding into the brain, mental-motor retardation, heart disease, sever intestinal inflammation, etc.” The March of Dimes website says that premature birth is “a serious health problem” and mentions the possibility of lasting disabilities, notably cerebral palsy. Newborn premature infants are especially susceptible to apnea and chronic lung disease [source].

In short, premature birth is an unnatural, potentially unhealthy occurrence that should not be chosen except for the most serious of reasons. Parents of premature children, however, are not bereft of support. Websites such as Prematurity.org and ComeUnity provide a wealth of resources. The later especially aids in ensuring that premature infants at a high risk for development delays are given “development follow-ups” to ensure that they are keeping up to overall peer standards. +++

“The Evil Effects of Legalizing Euthanasia & Physician-Assisted-Suicide”

Here is this week's installment of my ongoing essay series about contemporary bioethics issues. As always, your comments and clarifications are welcome. Here is a list of the previous topics I've treated:

• “The Moral Implications of Artificial Wombs”
• “Mandatory Organ Donation Initiatives”
• “Human-Animal Hybrids and the Catholic Response”

“The Evil Effects of Legalizing Euthanasia & Physician-Assisted-Suicide”

The Catholic Church has long taught that euthanasia is immoral. The Second Vatican Council (Gaudium et Spes #27) condemned all crimes against life including “any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia or willful suicide.” Because euthanasia violates the divine law, it will always and in every case be wrong. Moreover, in 1980, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a “Declaration on Euthanasia” which, besides repeating the Church’s perennial teaching, called upon those who work in the medical profession to make “all their skill available to the sick and dying … [as well as to provide] the comfort of boundless kindness and heartfelt charity” to all their patients.

The legalization of euthanasia and physician-assisted-suicide (PAS) not only violates the divine law and the dignity of the human person, it also violates the responsibility of health care professionals. In October 2005, a joint statement was issued by doctors and lawyers against the legalization of PAS in Canada. The authors collect an impressive selection of statistics and arguments making the case that legalized PAS initiates a “slippery slope” that inevitably leads to the abuse of patients and inferior care for the sick and dying.

Using evidence primarily from the state of Oregon, Belgium, and the Netherlands, the authors demonstrate how legalized PAS has resulted in an overall reduction of patient autonomy (killing patients who have not requested it), puts pressure on patients to end their life prematurely (because they feel themselves to be a burden), changes social attitudes about death and erodes a culture’s respect for life, and causes the medical profession to abandon or weaken its orientation towards preserving life.

Revealingly, the joint statement shows that most patients who request euthanasia are actually clinically depressed, and that when their underlying cause of depression (or pain) is alleviated, they frequently reverse their decision to end their life. Finally, the joint statement makes the point that far from a “good death”, euthanasia often results in a prolonged, painful and undignified passing.

Recently, a study published in the October issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics claimed that it could find no evidence to support the fears that legalized euthanasia has an impact on vulnerable people. Although the original text of this article was not yet available, the overview provided by HealthDay News contains some significant difficulties and the information it provides is woefully inadequate for those wishing to form a conclusions about the arguments. Three problematic sentences will be analyzed.

The first line reads: “Legalizing doctor-assisted suicide does not lead to a ‘slippery slope’ of excess deaths among the vulnerable poor, uninsured, elderly or other patients.” The term “excess deaths” here is an odd one to use. How, exactly, are “excess deaths” to be defined? The sentence also focuses upon the fear that a certain demographic represents an undue proportion of the assisted-suicide cases. This fact alone is irrelevant. The joint statement mentioned previously shows that all demographics risk an erosion of their best interests. When euthanasia is a legal option, it negatively influences the range of medical options given to the patient; much like the legalization of abortion could be argued to have negatively influenced the range of medical options given to mothers with an unwanted pregnancy.

A second line reads: "In the first nine years after the Oregon law took effect in the 1990s, 456 people received lethal prescriptions from doctors … that's 0.15 percent of all deaths in Oregon during those nine years, the researchers said.” Just because the proportion of PAS cases is low when compared to the general population does not mean that each of those cases was “legitimate.” One could say, for instance, that murders represented a low number of the total deaths in a state without in any way proving murder to be acceptable. A “slippery slope”, after all, is a slow, steady degeneration of principles.

The final line reads: “In both Oregon and The Netherlands, people who received a doctor's help to die were an average of 70 years old, and 80 percent were cancer patients.” This sentence tries to allay fears by stating that a) most people that were euthanized were old and b) most people who were euthanized had cancer. This sentence seems to operate on the premise that it is acceptable for elderly and sick people to die.

Such woefully-inadequate reporting does no service to furthering the debate, and fails to scratch the service of the significant body of evidence demonstrating the evil effects of legalized PAS. Wherever evil is done, even by ignorant or compromised agents, society suffers its ill effects. +++

Related/topical: Church rejects creation of bioethics committee on euthanasia (CNA)

“The Moral Implications of Artificial Wombs”

Here is this week's installment of my essay series on contemporary issues in bioethics. Heavy reading for a Monday morning, I realize, but hopefully worth the effort. Comments are always welcome.

Previous essays:

• “Mandatory Organ Donation Initiatives”
• “Human-Animal Hybrids and the Catholic Response”

This week's essay:

“The Moral Implications of Artificial Wombs”

Ectogenesis, used here to describe the development of a human being outside of a mother’s womb, may soon become a reality. In the past thirty years, for instance, incubators and related technological advances have drastically increased the threshold for the viability of premature infants outside the womb. More fundamentally, in recent years serious initiatives to create “artificial wombs” have achieved some significant successes. Dr. Thomas Schaffer has experimented with synthetic amniotic fluid which can sustain lamb fetuses, and more notably, Dr. Hung-Ching Liu has pioneered a technique to grow an artificial womb with cells taken from the lining of a woman’s uterus. [C.f. Christopher Kaczor, “Could Artificial Wombs End the Abortion Debate”? National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly (Summer 2005), p. 283.] Liu has even coaxed embryos to attach to the artificial womb’s “uterine wall” and begin developing. While many hurtles still remain (involving complex immunological and cardiovascular relations between the mother and child, for instance) it is not unreasonable to postulate that successful artificial wombs may exist within our lifetime.

The reaction to the prospect of artificial wombs among Catholic theologians is varied and often passionate. Some welcome the prospect as a possible solution to the abortion debate, while others warn that such technologies could inevitably lead to the “complete commodification of human beings.” [Steve Kellmeyer, paraphrasing Aldous Huxley in “Embryo Adoption: A Form of In Vivo Organ Donation?” NCBQ (Summer 2007), p. 267.] While a full treatment is beyond the scope of this essay, below are quickly summarized the other beneficial and negative consequences of artificial wombs commonly cited.

First, there are many potential beneficial uses for artificial wombs. They could give “surplus” human embryos conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF) the chance to escape their frozen status and mature towards birth. In the United States alone there are almost 400,000 frozen embryos. [A statistic cited by Rev. Nicanor Austriaco, O.P.] Artificial wombs could provide an alternative to women seeking abortions that would preserve the life of the embryo, namely, placing them in an artificial womb. Kaczor has argued that this option could radically alter the nature of the abortion debate, since many proponents of abortion on demand, strictly speaking, claim that women have the right to evacuate a fetus, and not actually to directly kill it. [“Could Artificial Wombs End the Abortion Debate”? (Summer 2005), pp. 283-301.] In our time, of course, evacuation means the death of the fetus because there is no other suitable environment for it to survive. Again, artificial wombs could provide a “safe haven” for ectopic pregnancies (where the embryo cannot naturally develop in its mother’s fallopian tube) and for instances where the mother is unable to support the life of the embryo because of uterine cancer, disease, poisoning or other complications.

Artificial wombs, at the same time, present many moral difficulties. Kaczor has compiled eight objections. Of these, here are several of the most relevant: artificial wombs are extreme technological means of replacing an intimate human function. Christine Rosen says [here], artificial wombs “represent the final severing of reproduction from the human body” since they could be used in conjunction with IVF to completely divorce the human mother and father from the act of bringing about new life. If embryo transfer is morally impermissible (a topic still disputed among theologians), then it would be immoral to transfer an embryo to an artificial womb. Furthermore, for all but the gravest reasons, a human embryo should not be deprived of the unique personal shelter offered by its mother. In accordance with Church teaching (for instance, expressed tangentially in Donum Vitae), artificial wombs deprive the embryo of its right to be born within and as a result of a human act of intercourse, and of its right to experience an integrated maturation from conception/gestation through natural birth within its mother’s womb. Also the scientific experiments that would lead to the production of artificial wombs could be gravely unethical in their intention (rendering human generation artificial), and means (IVF). Other objections of a sociological, political, psychology and theological nature could be formulated.

As an addendum, it is important to note that even though the prospect of functional artificial wombs is very likely far in the future, nevertheless, the utility and benefit of discussing the moral implications of the technology are already attainable. Simply speaking, while artificial wombs may in actuality “represent the final severing of reproduction from the human body” in rational debate they also completely abolish the concept of “viability” as a claim for legitimizing the death of pre-born human beings. Thus, far in advance of a future hypothetical where the abortion debate could entertain the possibility of artificial wombs as a real alternative to abortion, here and now the proponents of on-demand abortion must face the fact that “viability”, with each succeeding technological breakthrough, is more and more obviously demonstrated to be a relative scientific measurement which cannot in any valid way be used as a criterionfor establishing the metaphysical or biological status of human personhood.

Artificial wombs, in this sense, reveal the true humanness of a natural womb’s occupant. +++

“Mandatory Organ Donation Initiatives”

Last week I began a series of short essays on contemporary issues in bioethics, beginning with the topic "Recent Proposals for Human-Animal Hybrids and the Catholic Response". This week:

"Mandatory Organ Donation Initiatives"

In 2003 the President’s Council on Bioethics published a staff background paper on the topic of “Organ Transplantation: Ethical Dilemmas and Policy Choices”[1] in which the authors describe “a policy of organ conscription or mandatory organ retrieval” as something that “nearly all American[s] would rightfully find unacceptable for different reasons.” The paper continues:

Under such a policy, all cadaver organs would be retrieved regardless of the wishes of the deceased individual or the surviving family; dead bodies would be treated simply as a public resource in the service of the common goal of saving human life.

The staff paper notes that such a policy “by trying to preserve or pursue an absolute but isolated human good … ends up compromising or sacrificing other vital human goods.” Despite this claim that “nearly all” Americans (and by an arguable assumption, nearly all people) would consider mandatory organ donation unreasonable, there have been, in fact, many proponents of such policies, both before and after 2003. Several notable examples are listed below.

In 1992, the New York Times reported that a group founded by a sociologist at George Washington University proposed a national system of mandatory organ donation in which people not wishing to have their organs available for donation must notify a national registry to that effect.[2] The group cited a 1978 Georgia law as a precedent, which allegedly allowed eye or corneal tissue to be removed from a newly dead corpse if it the organ removal was unopposed by living relations and had not been not expressly objected to by the individual prior to death.

Ontario has a history of proposing aggressive organ retrieval legislation. In 1999 Ontario’s Conservative government and House of Commons Health Committee recommended that more pressure be put on individuals to donate their organs.[3] In 2006, an Ontario New Democrat Peter Kormos introduced a bill that proposed automatic organ donation unless people individually objected. Notably, Kormos included in his argument the claim that “Public opinion is changing” on the issue. In the face of such aggressive legislation and rhetoric, Dr. John Shea, a Toronto physician, recently published a report entitled “Organ Donation: The Inconvenient Truth” that highlights the dangers of abuse inherent in organ donation as it is practiced today.[4]

In the UK, in July of this year, Britain’s Chief Medical Officer proposed that organ donation should be made the default choice for all patients.[5] In 2005 the British Medical Association issued a statement that similarly proposed “presumed consent for donation.”[6]

The one reason for making organ donation mandatory (cited in turn by each of the proponents discussed above) is that there are not enough registered organ donors to satisfy patient demand; and this claim is true. However, these same proponents mistakenly claim that the low numbers of organ donation registrants is a byproduct of current policies and legislation that only permit voluntary organ donation. (For a notable case of this false conclusion, see: “The Case for Mandatory Organ Donation” in Wired[7].)

In fact, many individuals choose not to become organ donors because the current practice of organ transplantation, while not morally dubious in theory, in practice often results in medical decisions at-odds with respecting human life and dignity. Enacting legislation that universalizes and forces organ transplantation would do a further injustice to these goods. Instead, the medical establishment and regulatory committees would do better to address the abuses related to organ donation as it is currently practiced, which would in turn promote conscientious voluntary donor registration among individuals. +++

"Human-Animal Hybrids and the Catholic Response"

I'm going to try to get into the habit of composing a short (2 page) bioethics essay each week:

“Recent Proposals for Human-Animal Hybrids and the Catholic Response”

One of the emerging forms of scientific embryonic stem cell research is the creation of human-animal hybrids. On September 6th, the Human Fertilisation and Embryonic Authority (HEFA) in Britain approved the creation of human-animal embryos in theory, subject only to the possible intervention of the UK’s High Court. Without an intervention, the creation of hybrid embryos by two teams of scientists could begin in the UK by the end of this year. HEFA is believed to be the first fertility regulator in the world to explicitly approve such procedures.[1]

The request for authorization of the procedure was prompted, scientists say, by the lack of human embryos for research purposes. The hybrids would be created by inserting the nucleus of a human cell into the denucleated ovum of a mammal (most likely bovine). The resulting embryo would then be destroyed fourteen days after fertilization and its cell lines analyzed. This procedure is a type of In Vitro fertilization, but its problematic moral nature goes beyond IVF.

The Catholic Bishop’s Conference of England and Wales (CBCEW), along with the Linacre Center for Healthcare Ethics issued a joint response to this proposal back in June of 2007.[2] In point four on “Inter-species embryos”, the CBCEW opposes the creation of hybrid embryos, while not definitively deciding upon whether such an organism would be human, saying instead that “If an embryo is conceived with a single animal gene, or even if a human nucleus is placed in an animal ovum, this may be compatible with the presence of a genuine human embryo following the procedure.” However, the CBCEW is also careful to point out that “embryos with a preponderance of human genes should be assumed to be embryonic human beings, and should be treated accordingly.” On this issue, the teaching of the CBCEW is similar to the Church’s common response to the practice of In Vitro fertilization: i.e., such research is immoral and not be done, but if it is done the resulting human embryo’s rights must be respected.

On September 6th, the President of the Pontifical Academy for Life Elia Sgreccia gave an interview to Vatican Radio in which he described the creation of hybrids as a “monstrous act which is against human dignity.” His claim is spelled-out in a document released by the Linacre Centre in response to the Government’s proposal. When discussing the wrong done to the dignity of human life in the case of embryos created through IVF, the Linacre Centre states:

Serious as these wrongs are, there is an additional wrong in the case of animal-human hybrids, in that the embryo’s dignity is violated by the very structure of its creation … the embryo made from animal components is still further alienated from any possibility of parental respect or protection, in that this embryo may have literally no human parents.[3]

The Linacre Centre also admits the possibility that hybrid embryos may not, in fact, be human embryos. Nonetheless, even non-human embryos created with component human genetic material would still offend against human dignity, they claim. In an interview rebroadcast by Vatican Radio, the director of the Linacre Centre Dr. Helen Watt elaborated that hybrid creation is offensive because the human material is being used as a substitute for animal gametes, and when humans are brought into animal reproduction it violates the dignity of the human species.[4]

Apart from the other practical considerations involved with this development, it is clear that Catholic theologians must continue to both speak out against procedures that violate human dignity while at the same time deepening and refining their own understanding of the relevant scientific data in order to provide cogent, timely teachings on hybrid embryo procedures. +++