Sources:

• BBC News Article
• Brave New Families: Biblical Ethics and Reproductive Technologies (by Scott Rae, Baker, 1996)

Theme Music: Gli Uccelli (The Birds), Part I. Prelude (Allegro moderato), by Respighi, courtesy of Shockwave Sound.

Music Bumpers:

• Hymn to Saint Magnus - Jane Valencia
• Celtic Mystic - Tigertail

Except as noted, all music courtesy of The Podsafe Music Network.

To listen, just click on the player below (click on the “Audio MP3″ button if the player doesn’t appear).

Critics point out that the test may produce misleading results, uncovering genetic markers that merely indicate an increased risk of disease. There is no knowledge of how severely a child would be affected by a particular syndrome, even if a DNA irregularity were detected. In the near future these tests could be used not only to detect disease, but to screen for a variety of genetic characteristics completely unrelated to heath, such as height, weight, and physical attractiveness.

What is at stake for human valuing with this new technology? Historically, “treatment” for known genetic disorders has included abortion of the fetus. The prevalent utilitarian thinking of our culture maintains that life is worthy and valuable insomuch as it contributes in a tangible way to human flourishing. This test gives us yet one more tool to assess the physical or mental fitness of an individual before birth. If that life is found to be deficient in some characteristic, why shouldn’t it be terminated before it becomes a burden to itself and to society? Arthur Beaudet, chair of the Baylor College Department of Molecular and Human Development, commented, ”Some of these disorders are quite burdensome… People say, ‘I wish you’d given me the opportunity to know ahead of time. It’s really destroyed our lives.’”

This is alarming to those of us who value life at all stages and abilities. Do we view another human life as a diseased and useless burden, or do we perceive that life as a God-given gift, valuable because it too bears the image of the Creator?

Article in the Washington Post

Lady Warnock has been called “Britain’s leading moral philosopher,” and is especially well known for directing the Warnock Committee that set government policy concerning reproductive technologies and embryo research in the early 1980s. Now 84 years old, she is well known as a secular humanist and utilitarian thinker, who does not believe that human beings in the womb are valuable or protectable.

Lady Warnock has now turned her sights on the elderly, especially those suffering from dementia. In a recent interview for the Church of Scotland’s magazine Life and Work, she claims, “If you’re demented, you’re wasting people’s lives – your family’s lives – and you’re wasting the resources of the National Health Service.”

Here on this side of the pond, these comments are especially chilling to those whose loved ones have Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia, affecting as many as 5 million Americans. Her comments are the ultimate expression of the rampant utilitarian thinking so common in our society. This view of human value derives entirely from functional productivity, viz., those who have mental defects are less valuable simply because they cannot contribute to human flourishing in a tangible way.

But of course Lady Warnock misunderstands where the real duty lies in patients with Alzheimer’s. The duty lies, not with them, but with their caretakers. And it lies with each one of us, who must remain committed to the intrinsic value of life, where worth is not a functional thing to be earned, but a given to be respected and honored.

Article in the Telegraph

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn died at the age of 89 of a heart ailment. This once unknown Russian high school teacher published his first book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, in 1962, launching him from obscurity to international renown. He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970 for his brave prose confronting the evils of the former Soviet state.

Exiled from his native land, Solzhenitsyn became an American citizen, and continued speaking out against the Soviet empire. But he was equally critical of the West. He gave the commencement address at Harvard in 1978, a speech the New York Times called a “hectoring jeremiad.” Yet his criticisms seem amazingly prescient and appropriate today, even 30 years later.

In his Harvard address, Solzhenitsyn’s most scathing complaint against American society was its moral poverty. Materialism has triumphed to such an extent that “it has become possible to raise young people according to these ideals, leading them to physical splendor, happiness, possession of material goods, money and leisure, to an almost unlimited freedom of enjoyment.” The pursuit of happiness as unalienable right, embedded in our founding documents, has (on his view) led us to see material happiness as our highest calling.

Along the way, the very rights guaranteed by our democratic system have gotten in our way. The “supreme solution” to moral matters is found in a legal remedy:

If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint, a willingness to renounce such legal rights, sacrifice and selfless risk: it would sound simply absurd.

This confusing of the moral with what is merely legal is at the heart of our distorted American ideal of freedom: “Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man’s noblest impulses.” This means that man has become autonomous in his humanism: “[H]humanistic autonomy [is] the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists.”

Is it any wonder, then, that individual preferences become the moral barometer of our social, political, and ethical life? The Russian dissident has said well: “To such consciousness, man is the touchstone in judging and evaluating everything on earth. Imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects.”

In condemning material happiness as ultimate moral good, Solzhenitsyn makes the observation: “If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature.”

Which brings us to the ongoing blindness of our modern culture. Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard remarks received a cool reception when they were delivered, and still fall on deaf ears today. Despite a glowing elegiac tribute to the fallen writer, the New York Times failed to even mention that he was a devout Christian.

Alexandr, rejoice now in union with the Heavenly Father you have so loved. I hope that we may yet listen to your prophetic voice.

NY Times Tribute to Solzhenitsyn

Harvard Address

My good friend Dr. Joy Riley, Director of the Tennessee Center for Bioethics and Culture, has produced a short video entitled “Who Am I?” It is a poignant exploration of what it means to be a donor-conceived child.

“Who Am I?” (Video from YouTube)

The Tennessee Center for Bioethics and Culture

Today, however, kidney transplants are routine, as are transplants of other major organs such as the liver and heart. Survival has greatly improved, and the complication rate has dropped dramatically with the advent of powerful new anti-rejection drugs (with few side effects).

The problem? Not enough donor organs. For whatever reason, many members of the public are reluctant to sign up as donors. In Australia, there are only 10 donors per million people - compare that rate to 15/million in Germany, 27/million in the U.S., and 35/million in Spain.

This has led one Australian doctor to suggest a fee for donating. Kidney specialist Kevin Garvey has suggested that $50,000 might provide enough incentive to increase to donation rate. Federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon disagrees, saying:

Putting a price on somebody’s organs, and making it a economic proposition for people that might be financially vulnerable, we don’t think is the right way to go. We don’t want to open up that sort of exploitation.

In a recent post on this subject, I expressed concern over the dangers of commodifying our body organs. Are these concerns justified? After all, since there is such a critical shortage of donors, couldn’t paying for organs help meet our needs?

An amazing news story by BBC reporter Paula MacKinnon shows that concerns about exploitation are quite justified. Ms. MacKinnon is willing to donate one of her kidneys to a stranger in need, and she’ll do this as an act of selfless giving. Her justification is amazingly simple. She states, “I am donating one of my kidneys to a stranger. I don’t need two.”

Here’s where things get bizarre: While researching her story about kidney donation, Ms. MacKinnon secretly filmed people who tried to sell their kidneys. One woman wanted £250,000; another man wanted the price of a Mercedes, about £60,000 (note that at current exchange rates, the equivalent costs in U.S. dollars are $495,000 and $118,800, respectively). As part of her research, the reporter went to India, where she discovered a terrible legacy of butchered paid donors with long-term health problems (see our recent podcast which touches on this issue, as well).

Amazingly, Ms. MacKinnon is undeterred, trusting in the integrity of her own health care system to help her to carry out her altruistic plan safely. I’m impressed.

Financial incentives to make more organs available? It’s still a bad idea, with too many hidden dangers.

block quote source

BBC Report

Sources:

• MedAssist Web Site (includes Kevin Stewart video)
• Arthur Caplan Commentary

Theme Music: Gli Uccelli (The Birds), Part I. Prelude (Allegro moderato), by Respighi, courtesy of Shockwave Sound.

Special Music: “Dignity” by Green Druid

Music Bumper: “Medley of Scots Tunes,” by Rachel Barton Pine.

To listen, just click on the player below (click on the “Audio MP3″ button if the player doesn’t appear).

The term eugenics was actually coined in 1883 by Sir Francis Galton, an Englishman and cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton, a brilliant statistician, anthropologist, and explorer, applied Darwinian science to develop theories about heredity and how to have “good offspring.” His original writings called for a “positive eugenics,” which would benignly guide young couples to find the “best” partners, in order to ensure that certain desirable traits would carry on.

Yet the legacy of eugenics has not been a good one for humankind. Galton’s ideas soon gave way to “negative eugenics,” which recommended the culling of defectives and degenerates from the population in order to promote and preserve the fittest. Eugenics movements in the United States, Germany, and Scandinavia favored the negative approach. “Genetically selected” traits included: pauperism, feeble-mindedness, alcoholism, rebelliousness, nomadism, criminality, prostitution — all due to “defective germ plasm.” On this idea, defective individuals should not reproduce, which led to compulsory sterilization. There was a strong racist element as well, which led to selective immigration restrictions.

The popularity of eugenics thinking waned in the U.S. and Great Britain with the extreme forms seen in Nazi Germany. So why are we seeing a resurgence of eugenics thinking today? Social Darwinism and human engineering is again on the rise, with a utilitarian calculus that desires to tinker with our traits in order to make men “better.” A recent post by Wesley Smith entitled “It Pays to be a Eugenicist” discusses the big money available to promote human neurological enhancement. This meddling with our birthright, our human givens, has Wesley Smith scared, and I’m right there with him. Isn’t there a saying about those who forget the lessons of history?

Eugenics Archive

We examine the context of cloning, both as a possible reproductive technology and (more likely) as a source of human embryos for stem cell research.

Sources:

• Cloning Fact Sheet
• Laws and Public Policy about Cloning
• Hearing on Human Cloning Ban

Theme Music: Gli Uccelli (The Birds), Part I. Prelude (Allegro moderato), by Respighi, courtesy of Shockwave Sound.

Special Music: “Thousands Are Sailing,” by Mike Hanrahan

Music Bumpers: “Celtic Mystic,” by Tigertail and “Dignity” by Green Druid.

To listen, just click on the player below (click on the “Audio MP3″ button if the player doesn’t appear).

Player:

The latest assault on conscience comes from the Ethics Committee of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The committee has issued an opinion, summarized in an article entitled, “The Limits of Conscientious Refusal in Reproductive Medicine.” It reads, in part:

Physicians and other health care providers have the duty to refer patients in a timely manner to other providers if they do not feel that they can in conscience provide the standard reproductive services that patients request. In resource-poor areas, access to safe and legal reproductive services should be maintained. Providers with moral or religious objections should either practice in proximity to individuals who do not share their views or ensure that referral processes are in place. In an emergency in which referral is not possible or might negatively have an impact on a patient’s physical or mental health, providers have an obligation to provide medically indicated and requested care.

Notice the implications of this statement (source):
1) The millennia-old Hippocratic tradition of medicine is “first of all, do no harm.” Pro-life physicians feel that participation in abortion violates this tradition.
2) At the very least, the right to refuse to go against one’s conscience has been protected in ethics and by law.
3) The ACOG ethics statement insists that physicians must refer requests for abortion to other practitioners, even though such referral makes them complicit with the abortion act.
4) This even goes so far as to dictate where a physician may practice.
5) Finally, the statement insists that physicians must perform the procedure if no one else is available, if refusing might have a negative impact on physical or mental health (note the wording: we’re not necessarily talking about an immediate threat to the life of the mother here).

Furthermore, there is a move to link adherence to this ethics statment to board certification for OB-GYN doctors. Physicians who refuse to provide or refer for abortion may lose their right to practice medicine.

The ACOG ethics statement has not yet become policy, and has generated widespread disagreement and controversy, especially in view of the fact that it conflicts with laws in 46 out of 50 states.

Stay tuned.

(Conscience laws by state)

[T]hey tested this combination of genes in a commercially available, genetically modified cell culture, IMR90 fetal fibroblasts. (These cells were cultured from a little girl aborted at 16 weeks gestation). These cells are fetal cells, not adult cells, and they were chosen because they have been studied and the genome is well known.

There are other ethical ways to produce the DNA needed for transformation, efficiently and morally. If these means were employed to produce the needed DNA, there would be no moral issues with the use of reprogrammed adult cells for research.

Original Scientific Papers:

Takahashi, et al (Yamanaka research group in Kyoto, Japan)
Yu, et al (Thomson research group in Wisconsin)

My special guests in today’s podcast are some Cedarville University students in my ‘Principles of Bioethics’ class.They are: Katie Condit, Tara Self, Jessica Seman, Kate Temple, and John Wildman.

Sources:

• When Medicine Went Mad: Bioethics and the Holocaust, Arthur Caplan, Humana, 1992.
• The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, Robert Lifton, Perseus, 2000.

Theme Music: Gli Uccelli (The Birds), Part I. Prelude (Allegro moderato), by Respighi, courtesy of Shockwave Sound.

Special Music: “Melancholy,” by Mark Heimonen

Music Bumpers: “Winter I plead,” by Acoustic Rosh and “Lost Acoustic” by Flashover.

To listen, just click on the player below (click on the “Audio MP3″ button if the player doesn’t appear).

Player:

I’m talking, of course, about the announcment on November 20th that researchers had converted ordinary human skin cells into embryonic stem cells. They did this by simply adding four genes that caused these cells to de-differentiate into a “pluripotent” form. If the works holds up, such cells could become the foundation for growing all kinds of starter cells, with the promise of cures for heart disease, Parkinson’s disease, and diabetes, to name just a few possibilities. According to the New York Times:

Researchers and ethicists not involved in the findings say the work, conducted by independent teams from Japan and Wisconsin, should reshape the stem cell field. At some time in the near future, they said, today’s debate over whether it is morally acceptable to create and destroy human embryos to obtain stem cells should be moot.

There is still a lot of work to be done, and actual clinical trials on humans may actually be years away. But the ethical concerns that have so bitterly divided our society on this issue may be alleviated.

Imagine — men and women of good faith, from all different religions and worldviews, working together to solve the health problems of humanity.

Stay tuned. This could be a wonderful Christmas present indeed.

NYTimes Article
Further Analysis

Finally, we consider a beautiful engraving by William Blake, to illustrate a Robert Blair poem, The Grave, and how it captures the idea of the soul.

Sources and Links:

• Project Gutenberg E-Text of Phaedo
• The First Fourteen Days of Human Life

Theme Music: Gli Uccelli (The Birds), Part I. Prelude (Allegro moderato), by Respighi, courtesy of Shockwave Sound.

Special Music: “Minnie,” by Psykosoul

Music Bumpers: “Untitled,” by Axiom to Zeal and “Tolkien: The Hobbit” by the Brobdingnagian Bards

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Player:

The solution? Governor John Corzine wants to borrow half a billion dollars more and invest it in embryonic stem cell research. Presumably, he thinks this is worth the risk, since some predict there will be a huge jackpot if his gamble pays off.

Of course, he is flying in the face of facts. No studies currently show any benefit to human beings, and in mice embryonic stem cells cause tumors. Assemblyman John Rooney said, “We’ve taken a failed [area of] research and are now giving them money with no strings attached.”

Don’t worry. Future governors can just raise taxes further to pay for this huge gamble.

National Review Article

Consider the case at a New York medical center where a woman and her brother were both operated on at the same time. One of the woman’s kidneys was removed, but not for transplanting into her brother. Instead her organ went to a man she had never met.

At the same time, another woman had her kidney removed to give to the first woman’s brother (once again donor and recipient had never met). This idea was mutally beneficial, since donors and recipients were good tissue matches for each other. The operations were timed to occur at exactly the same moment, so no one could back out.

How much is a new kidney worth? With the advent of these so-called “paired exchanges” (the first was in 2001), some advocates are suggesting that kidneys should be considered commodities - that people could offer their own kidneys for sale.

A moment’s reflection will reveal some of the dangers of this idea. Think of the exploitation of the poor that might occur with schemes like this. After all, this has already happened in other countries, where rich foreigners “buy” organs - a sort of “transplant tourism” (see my blog post on this).

It is a disturbing thought that our body parts might be for sale. This seems like a bad solution to the problem of a shortage of donor organs. Such commodification of ourselves can only add to the devaluation of human beings throughout society.

[General News Article]
[Kidney Swap Article]

Of course, abortion is not even legal in some countries, and Mifeprex is expensive. What if pregnant women could just take misoprostol (the prostaglandin) alone? It is is cheap, readily available, and it can often cause an abortion all by itself.

A recent article in the medical journal The Lancet attempts to study this question (Vol. 369, No. 9577, June 9, 2007). Looking at data from five different countries, misoprostol was effective as the sole agent most of the time. All women were carefully followed by OB-GYN doctors, with follow-up surgical procedures performed where necessary. One Web-based article on the technique states: “In approximately 10% to 35% of cases, aspiration intervention is required.”

So is this a boon for the reproductive rights of poor women? How will this translate into developing countries where medical follow-up is almost nonexistent? Under the guise of ‘easy’ and ‘cheap’ abortions, the many complications from this short-cut technique may never be known. It seems that many women who will die of infection after incomplete induced abortion.

Oh, and by the way, a lot of unborn babies will die as well.

Misoprostol Abortion: Article

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Theme Music: Gli Uccelli (The Birds), Part I. Prelude (Allegro moderato), by Respighi, courtesy of Shockwave Sound.

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Since then, Mosher has become president of the Population Research Institute, a pro-life educational organization “dedicated to protecting and defending human life, ending human rights abuses committed in the name of family planning, and dispelling the myth of overpopulation.” PRI has documented the thousands of forced late-term abortions and millions of coerced sterilizations in China, with important implications for targeted population control measures in other developing countries.

According to Mosher, “Population control encourages domestic tyranny of a very personal and deadly sort.” This is what happens when alarmist views of overpopulation are somehow translated into public policies that view people as pestilence. Rather than focus on the root issues of poverty through education and economic development, coercive population control measures seek to cure the “disease” by killing the patient.

Human Life Review Article

YouTube Video