Jews vs. Catholics on the Stem Cell Debate
'Oy Vitae' is the title for this William Saletan piece about religion and stem cell research. Saletan is doing a series of "I watched the bioethicist" pieces, most recently in the form of a bunch of adoring pieces about the Kass commission, which we blogged some time ago. In the current piece, also in Slate, he takes a travel diary approach to reviewing what he sees at a bioethics conference in Rome.Tuesday, March 8
It turns out that Catholic faith in reason cuts both ways. It can dispel the yuck factor but can just as easily override our sense of goodness. That's the inadvertent lesson of Pacholczyk's morning presentation on women who "adopt"—i.e., implant and carry to term—IVF embryos. He asserts that such adoptions are intrinsically evil. I stare at him in disbelief, but he makes a case. Procreation is unitary; therefore, just as it's wrong to have sex without openness to pregnancy, it's wrong to get pregnant without sex. What if a woman has hired a clinic to cultivate IVF embryos and is on the table ready to have them implanted? Pacholczyk says she should "stop the train of evil"—get up and leave the clinic. The embryos must be left in limbo because they can't be "licitly" implanted.
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I think he's wrong about Catholic teaching. See the text right after what you quoted:
Father Thomas Williams, the dean of university's theology school, makes the opposite case. Pacholczyk's theory collapses, he says, because it implies that IVF embryos are "partially procreated children." "All beings are either persons or non-persons," Williams argues. "From a Catholic perspective, there's no such thing as partial persons, part something and part someone."
- by Hamilcar on Mar 22, 2005 at 7:36 PM | link