Who Speaks for the Embryos?

By Marc Lappé

The debate over stem cells unnecessarily pits the medical and religious communities against each other. Medicine sees the enormous potential for human good from isolating stem cells from embryos; religion sees the enormous potential for human evil in allowing incipient beings to be eviscerated and killed. These seemingly irreconcilable differences put us into a kind of moral end game.

Many conditions where cell attrition irrevocably undermines function, like Parkinson's disease, could clearly be helped by an infusion of new cellular life. The dilemma is that harvesting the necessary progenitors will cost a potential human life, albeit at an extremely early stage. Can such taking of life ever be moral? Some groups, like orthodox Jews, believe that life may be sacrificed in the name of greater good, say to save a group of persons being "pursued" by a force bent on killing them. Could diseases like Parkinson's be such a force?

Even if we were to agree on the degree of danger justifying killing, no one has provided the proper formula for deciding who can speak for an embryo. Who can meaningfully give consent to take an incipient life or decide for what purposes that life may be sacrificed? Here is where a little perspective may be useful.

On the face of it, embryo research appears to wrest something good (medical advances) from something bad (the death of a potential person). But we need to remember this kind of thinking got us into trouble in the past. We have only to look at the Nazi experimentation permitted on those with "lives not worth living" to remind us of the horrors of this slippery slope. At the same time, we need to be reminded that embryonic research is not in the same moral arena as Nazi research. Unlike the Nazi atrocities, we are not experimenting on extant human beings, but potential ones. Most ethicists agree that on a sliding scale of morality, the embryo deserves less of our concern than do fetuses, who in turn deserve less than do children or the elderly. Why? Because of their vulnerability and need for protection.

Indeed, the maxim of protecting the vulnerable would help inform both sides of the debate. For us to neglect the early fetus or embryo because it is only "potential life", is to overlook the fact that damage done early in life can have terribly persistent and pervasive effects later in life.

The developing embryo is exquisitely vulnerable to insult from environmental and human-made intrusions. Many of the diseases researchers have identified as targets for stem cell therapy may arise from early damage in embryonic stages of development. Parkinson's disease may have its origins in early fetal damage to the developing brain. So might Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS) or leukemia.

There is a kind of moral disconnect here: how can we neglect the prenatal causes of disease while at the same time being willing to damage developing embryos intentionally in order to treat them? You don't have to be a theologian to wonder if it might not be more morally acceptable to encourage prevention and protection of embryonic and fetal life from environmental damage than to take more of those lives in the name of rescue. This position, that protecting fetal life has priority over stem cell research to help adults may give a new twist to the debate.

If we encouraged research on stem cells to assure their normal participation in embryonic development we might be on more solid ground than usurping such cells to help diseased adults. We could give something back to embryonic life by learning about why and how its various cell lines are vital to normal development. This idea to allow research on subjects where that research helps others in a similar class is the mainstay of the argument for the borderline acceptability of research on children. As for subjects, use the embryos from spontaneous miscarriages, and where necessary, those embryos whose fate is sealed by their imminent demise at fertility clinics. Only after vouchsafing that we have helped the brothers and sisters of those embryos whose own development was impossible, do we have the right to use some of the derived stem cell lines to improve the prospects of others who are damaged by the vagaries of life and existence in a toxic world.