« Spiritual healing | Main | Medieval fever? »
June 17, 2004
A question of ethics ....
When does the soul begin? When is life formed? What is life? These are fairly fundamental questions, yet no one has the answers, yet, and quite possibly never will. Is it playing God to interfere with genetics, to attempt to create human clones? It may well be, and do we really know what we are doing when we do this?
I am pro-life, not in the sense of the extremists who assault abortionists or wave placards, daub paint, or engage in vitriolic and emotive campaigns, but in the sense that I do not believe that we have even begun to understand the full impact of what we do when we engage in these scientific experiments. I am also very much in favor of research which will assist in eliminating the scourge of debilitating conditions such as diabetes, Crohn's Disease, liver malfunction, Parkinson's Disease, Alzheimer's, and many more. I am in favour of most things which will improve the quality of life for everyone, but, here is the dilemma - have I the right to prosper by depriving an unborn child, even one created in a Petri Dish, of its life?
There is much debate about the ethics of the latest research to use cloned human embryos to generate a cure (using the "stem" cells) for such things as diabetes. And a cure for this distressing condition, brought on by a failure of the pancreas to produce the enzyme needed to break down sugar into a form in which it can be absorbed by our systems, would be a miracle indeed. But is it ethical? Is the cloned embryo a human life? Has it a soul? At what point is life, life? Is "life" only to be measured in purely "material terms" such as "it looks like a human being, it walks, speaks, talks, or crawls and gurgles like a human being, therefore it is alive" - the "I think, therefore I am" line of philosophy? Or do we measure life as the existence of living tissue which may or may not become a fully developed human being?
This is the dilemma, is it not? The law recognises only a neonate as a "living" person post birth. Yes, there is protection for the infant in the womb after 24 weeks of gestation, but it has no "rights" until it is born. This is interestingly reflected in our pattern of measuring a person's "Star sign". In the West it is taken as the time of birth, in the East it is the time of conception! Thus, under the Eastern view, a person comes into being at the moment of conception. Ergo, our cloned human embryo is therefore a "person" in its own right.
Now we really move into the realms of conceptual "ethics"!
If you believe, as I am coming to, that the spark which is that first part of life, and which is present as the cells begin to divide and form as the embryo, is a part of the Living God, creator of the universe and the essence of life itself, then we have a problem immediately. Why? Because the embryo is already a living soul. Now I know that many of the scientists and researchers do not believe this, and would argue that the whole concept of a "soul" is a nonsense (as that great "Socialist" Lenin put it - an opiate of the people); thus they would therefore argue that they are not destroying a human being, merely the beginnings of one, which is neither sentient nor human. Their own evidence rather refutes this. You have only to see the struggle put up by an embryo during an abortion to know that there is a major question mark over this entire issue.
One other point which remains unanswered at this point is this: why, if the science of cloning is so inexact at this time, use embryos? The cloned sheep Dolly and her subsequent offspring have all shown major defects and have aged rather badly. Surely this is the risk with cloning any human cells - and I am all too conscious of the potential benefits - that we may in fact achieve a result which is very far from what we wanted to do. As I said, there are no easy answers, and, as with all the Genies in all the Arabian Nights and other folk stories, once you have taken it out of the bottle - it will not go back in!
We have now developed the technology and a part of the understanding to be able to "create" life in a laboratory. Do we really know what is happening when we do this, and, more importantly, do we have the moral, spiritual, and ethical integrity to recognise that we are now in the realms of God - and, just maybe, treading where we have no business to be.
In this arena I do not believe that we can rely on legal definitions of what is and is not ethical. We are in totally uncharted waters. Violent responses are equally inappropriate; that leaves us with prayer and a lot of thoughtful soul-searching to do. Pray, my brothers and sisters, for all those involved in this work; pray that they may be guided by God, and pray that they may learn to recognise the spark of life for what it truly is.
Posted by The Gray Monk at June 17, 2004 10:33 AM