You may have heard that the Obama administration is reversing Bush-era rules regarding embryonic stem cell research. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite of Chicago Seminary (UCC) is down with that for reasons that illustrate why theologians should not necessarily be listened to even when discussing ethical questions:

There have been many moral objections raised to embryonic stem cell research. But as President Obama prepares to sign an executive order to repeal his predecessor’s ban on federal funding for such scientific inquiry, we should also ask what the moral imperatives are to do this research. In addition, are there moral insights that can help us develop guidelines for the research?

It shoudl be noted that the Bush rules only prohibited federal funding for new ESC lines. Research has been going on all along, regardless of anyone’s moral objections.

Restrictions on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research have retarded scientific investigation that could well yield important medical advances. Devastating diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, diabetes, heart disease, and spinal cord injury may see treatments emerge that can relieve enormous suffering and promote healing. There is a clear moral imperative, shared across many religions, to relieve suffering and promote healing. This is a strong ground on which to base religious arguments for the research. [Emphasis added.]

Thistlethwaite is talking pie-in-the-sky. To date, there have been no results from ESCR that indicate that treatments for the diseases she mentions, or any others for that matter, are within reach. Some researchers estimate it could be 50 years before useful treatments based on ESCR will be available, if ever. But that’s not the biggest problem with Thistlethwaite’s thinking.

This is a classic ends-justify-the-means argument, made worse by being based on hypothetical ends rather than realistic ones. Her reasoing is thus: 1) relieving suffering, pain, and disease is a moral good; 2) ESCR may at some point in the unforeseeable future relieve said ills; 3) therefore, ESCR is a moral good. Thistlethwaite is able to blow off the moral arguments because her heart’s in the right place, and she wants to help people. That’s all fine and good, but it does nothing to deal with the questions that surround ESCR, which involves the deliberate use of human life as a means rather than an end, something which is anathema to Christianity and ought to be to civilized people.

The fact is that there is a way to achieve at least some of what Thistlethwaite wants to do, and its being done right now. But she’s not impressed by the use of adult stem cells:

Some ask, why not avoid this controversy and just use adult stem cells? Stem cells have been found in several tissues of adults. While adult stem cells have been used in scientific inquiry, what makes embryonic stem cells such a promising area for medical research is that these cells are more plastic, i.e. it is easier to encourage them to become other cell types. In addition, there is concern that adult stem cells may not reproduce as accurately as embryonic stem cells, as the adult stem cells may lose genetic information after multiple cell divisions. [Emphasis added.]

So instead of a hypothetical benefit, we have a hypothetical problem. We have to set aside the morally unobjectionable means because there might be problems with it, while we have to take the morally objectionable path because some good might come out of it. That’s a bizarre way to do ethics, in my humble opinion. But Thistlethwaite thinks she has  away around the moral objections:

It is thought that at least half of fertilized eggs in normal human reproduction do not survive when they fail to implant in the uterus. Failure of natural implantation is not considered by anyone to be a loss of human life. This natural process of destruction of embryos without implantation is analogous to what is actually the case with stem cell research. Embryonic stem cell research begins with a group of human embryonic cells called a blastocyst, which exists before implantation. When this group of cells has divided to make a small group of cells, the stem cells are extracted and the blastocyst is destroyed.

Once again, means are confused with ends. Consider this analogy: all people die. Therefore, whether they die of natural causes or because someone shoots them is morally irrelevant, because they are dead in the end in either case. Ah, she replies, but the organism in question never becomes human anyway:

There is helpful insight from organ donation in regard to brain death. This is a widely accepted arbitrary definition of brain death. The absence of brain activity and its irreversibility constitute the medical definition of death. While not a complete analogy, the parallels for stem cell research are that fertilized embryos have no brain activity and where they will never be implanted, will never develop brain activity.

Once again, we have the same problem. In the case of the brain-dead person, something has happened to cause that condition. If it happened because of natural causes, we accept it as the natural conclusion of life. If the person is shot in the head, we call it murder and punish the shooter. In the case of the embryo, we have interrupted a natural process, and prevented what would have happened it we hadn’t interfered, which is the development of brain function and full-orbed life. It’s true, as Thistlethwaite goes on to say in trying to analogize fertilized egg use to organ donation, that lots of fertilized eggs from in vitro fertilization clinics and such are never used, and discarded like so much garbage, but I’m adamantly opposed to IVF, too, for the same reasons as above–it’s wrong to create human life for our own uses, however admirable those might be,

And as an aside, I might note that Thistlethwaite–a strong supporter of the unfettered abortion license–in her argument about brain activity effectively destroys the basis for supporting abortion after about nine weeks, since that’s when brain activity begins in the developing child. Not that that matters when the one sacrament of the culture of death is at stake. Though it may be that, given the almost blind faith in ESCR evinced by supporters such as Thistlethwaite, there will soon be a second.

UPDATE: I saw this a while ago from Associated Press, in a story headlined “Stem-cell policy change liberating for researchers”:

Eight years of frustration are close to an end for scientists seeking ways to use embryonic stem cells to combat illness and injury.

Translation: the private sector wasn’t interested enough in this work, but now that we can feed at the federal trough, it’s party time!

[President] Obama will hold an event at the White House to announce the move, a senior administration official said Friday. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the policy had not yet been publicly announced.

The aim of the policy is to restore “scientific integrity” to the process, the administration official said.

Translation: we don’t have any problem funding research that millions of Americans consider immoral or speculative using their tax dollars. Why should you?

“America’s biomedical research enterprise experienced steady decline over the past eight years, with shrinking budgets and policies that elevated ideology over science. This slowed the pace of discovery and the search for cures,” said Sean Morrison, director of the University of Michigan’s Center for Stem Cell Biology.

Translation: the yahoos don’t understand that just because we can do something means that we should do it, and that if we can’t do it, they still have an obligation to fund us!

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