Ex 20:1-17 or 20:1-3, 7-8, 12-17
Ps 19:8, 9, 10, 11
1 Cor 1:22-25
Jn 2:13-25
We acknowledge our sinfulness, our guilt is ever before us.
Last Monday, as he promised during his campaign, President Obama lifted the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, a ban which President Bush had imposed shortly after taking office in 2001. That means that our taxpayer dollars can now be used to fund this research, research that always begins with the destruction of a human embryo. The embryos destroyed are “spare” embryos left over from in vitro fertilization. Not selected for implantation, their parents donate them for scientific research.
Now these embryos are very tiny human beings, in the very earliest state of development – at this stage scientists call them blastocysts, and they are the very next stage of development of the human embryo after the successful fertilization of the egg. Composed of about 100 cells shaped like a hollow ball, they have already differentiated into two types of cells – from one type will come the fetus, from the other the placenta.
The blastocyst must implant itself successfully into the uterine wall of the mother in order to continue development into a fetus. Within its inner mass, the blastocyst contains embryonic stem cells, and the researcher must harvest these cells and culture them to obtain an embryonic stem cell line. Harvesting embryonic stem cells always kills the blastocyst. I was once a blastocyst – all of us were once blastocysts – it’s a stage of life all human beings must go through.
Many people argue that the blastocyst is “only a mass of cells,” not a human being, just as they argue that a child in the womb has no rights until it’s born. But the blastocyst is not just a mass of cells such as you find in a Petri dish. The blastocyst has form, it has structure, and it has purpose, purpose bound up in the combined DNA of its parents, the blueprint for a unique human being. The church teaches that it is fully human, and to kill it violates the law of God – to kill it is murder.
The ostensible purpose of embryonic stem cell research is to find cures for certain terrible diseases and injuries which afflict human beings. Researchers hold out hope of cures for Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, diabetes and spinal cord trauma to name those most often touted. Embryonic stem cells are pluripotent – that is, they may have the ability to be engineered into many different kinds of tissue, tissue that can repair trauma or substitute for cells that have been damaged or destroyed by disease. But our moral law, the law of God, holds that despite the noble end of curing disease or injury, to achieve that end by destroying human beings is intrinsically evil. The end never justifies the means. Never!
During WWII, the Nazis conducted terrible experiments on human beings in the death camps of Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Auschwitz among the most infamous. In one set of these experiments, they wanted to learn how best to protect their airmen shot down over the North Sea from its frigid waters. So they dressed Jewish men in the protective clothing they’d developed, tied them up, and put them in vats of freezing water. Or, alternatively they strapped them naked to litters and put them outside in the freezing snow. Then they watched to see how long it would take them to die. They didn’t always kill them. They also wanted to learn the best ways to warm them up after they’d been in the freezing water or exposed to the frigid air for different lengths of time. So they conducted experiments on warming them back to normal temperatures.
The Allies captured the records of these experiments when they liberated the death camps. Although much of what they did was not only evil but bad science, the results of the Nazi freezing experiments indicated that the best way to warm a person after exposure to freezing temperatures is by rapid active rewarming. Subsequent legitimate researchers proposed to use the Nazi data in their own research, because the Nazis had subjected their victims to extremes that no legitimate researcher on hypothermia would even approach – and they had meticulously recorded the results. The editor of the New England Journal of Medicine roundly rejected one such proposal to analyze and publish the Nazi data to fill a research gap. The wickedness of the Nazi experiments was so great that even though data from them might be beneficial to legitimate research it must be rejected because of its origin.[1]
Embryonic stem cell research is as morally repugnant as the research carried out in the Nazi death camps and its results are just as tainted.
The real tragedy of President Obama’s executive order is that it’s unnecessary. In just the past year scientist have made some incredible advances in stem cell research that do not require the killing of embryos. As Cardinal Francis George wrote to President-elect Obama on January 16th of this year, “recent startling advances in reprogramming adult cells into embryonic-like stem cells – hailed by the journal Science as the scientific breakthrough of the year – are said by many scientists to be making embryonic stem cells irrelevant to medical progress.” [2]
Cardinal George was referring to research where scientists were able to take adult human skin cells and transform them into pluripotent cells, producing what are called induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS – they apparently have all the potential of growing into a variety of tissues that could ultimately lead to the capability to cure diseases with a patient’s own cells. In a second feat of genetic wizardry, researchers forced mature cells to change their form and function, bypassing the use of stem cells altogether. Working with live mice, an American team demonstrated that certain types of pancreatic cells could be forced to transform into beta cells, the cells that manufacture insulin. Since Type I diabetes kills beta cells, this research holds promise for a cure to that disease without killing human embryos.[3]
Much – no most – of the evil in today’s world comes from human beings’ persistent failure to respect and cherish the life and dignity of all human persons, from the moment of their conception until their natural death. Our ancestors in faith, the Jewish people, made a covenant with God at Mt Sinai in which they pledged to follow God’s law as it was given to them through Moses. We heard that law read to us in our first reading today. We call that law the 10 Commandments. There were other law codes in the ancient Middle East, but this code was unique in that God gave it to the Jewish people, so they could be in right relationship with him. This code was not just a code of laws to regulate society; it was meant to govern their relationship with God as well. When they broke God’s laws – and they did so many times throughout their history – they didn’t just break a law. They disrupted their relationship with God. We disrupt our own relationship with God whenever we break his commandments.
Science has done many wonderful things for humanity, the cure of disease being chief among them. But science is bound by the same moral law as is all human activity no matter how noble its purpose. All of us want to find cures for such horrible diseases as Alzheimer’s and diabetes, but this is not the way to do it. Embryonic stem cell research kills human beings at the very beginning of life. No cure is worth that! Providing federal tax dollars – my dollars and your dollars – to support this research is just – flat – wrong!
[1] Cohen, Bruce C. “The Ethics Of Using Medical Data From Nazi Experiments.” Found on the web at http://www.jlaw.com/Articles/NaziMedEx.html found on the web on March 12, 2009.
[2]Statement of Cardinal Justin Rigali on March 9, 2009 found at http://www.usccb.org/comm/archives/2009/09-052.shtml on March 13, 2009.
[3] “Science's Breakthrough of the Year: Reprogramming Cells” Found on the web at http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/12/isciencei-names-top-10-scientific-breakthroughs-of-2008.ars on March 13, 2009.
