Abortion at heart of stem-cell debate

John Kass
November 25, 2007 Chicago Tribune



I wouldn't dare try to explain the science of the new discovery last week that promises to shift the agonizing debate about embryonic stem cells.

But if the science is right, mature human skin cells can be manipulated in laboratories to act as embryonic stem cells and replace damaged or diseased cells in human beings.

Though I can't begin to explain the science, the politics seem clear, despite the Orwellian twisting of the language over the years, despite the political symbolism and political iconography. It's clear enough.


It's about abortion. It has always been about abortion, about the choices we make and how we fight to use or deny human embryos for research -- all of it like hands that shape our future culture.

There have been other scientific and funding aspects to the stem-cell debate, but at the retail political level, "stem-cell research" has long been a proxy for abortion rights and for the rights of human life unborn.

So "stem-cell" is code, a slogan, the fact understood by political consultants and their candidates, by the abortion rights groups and the politicians who seek their votes and by those that oppose abortion rights and seek those other votes.

Human embryos don't vote. Many Americans don't believe there is life in them at such an early stage. I do. But others don't.

Yet if left alone in a mother's womb, nurtured there, surely they'd be born to run and breathe and think and speak, and perhaps grow old enough to vote. And they'd want to survive and they'd express that desire through public policy debates, like this one.

Every creature born wants to live, many at almost any cost, and humans are instilled with the will to continue. If this means taking other human lives to ensure survival, well, hasn't that question been answered by centuries of human history?

We've killed one another by tribe and clan, over hunting and grazing land, with clubs and pointed spears, and killed over water. For the past several thousand years, we've killed one another over gold. Now we kill for energy. We kill one another for the power to live. We justify it with words. But the act remains the same.

And for all the years the embryonic stem-cell debate has dragged on, we've used words to obscure what we've been doing. We abandoned old notions of common morality to adopt a new code born of scientific rationalism:

That it is proper to take human embryos and use the human life going on inside them as a product to perpetuate other, more powerful lives.

This involves the questions I keep asking -- and have asked in various ways for years since this debate began:

What is the psychic cost of all of this? What debt is incurred by those who survive by destroying life? What of those who come after us? What world do we create for them by entertaining such choices and pretending that technology is without consequence? What happens to us in the act of avoiding these questions, so eager are we at the promise of new discoveries?

I'm sure I'm in the distinct journalistic minority on this. And I'm certain I'll feel that way when this is published. One buzzword in American newsrooms is "diversity," which I hope means more than mere differences in skin pigment.

I sure hope so, because I am opposed to abortion. I haven't always felt that way, but things changed when my sons were born. And my Greek Orthodox faith teaches me that abortion is wrong, that human life is sacred. Naturally all this shapes my view and others like me, and I know many of you differ.

Sometimes I wish that those who ridicule us for faith would acknowledge from time to time that their views may also shaped by an equally fervent faith -- the belief in modern scientific progress as the means to solve the world's problems.

But faith in God or faith in science doesn't have to be mutually exclusive. And the fact of embryonic stem-cell research remains:

Human embryos are converted into a medical product in the hopes of perpetuating the lives of other, more powerful humans desperate for a cure.

Now, though, that may be ending with the discoveries of last week. It must be unsettling to established interests. From loved ones of those who desperately seek rescue from terrible diseases and have no patience for politics; to abortion rights groups; to scientists uninterested in politics, except as it pertains to the funding of their research.

Early news accounts of the new scientific advance predictably framed the debate as rational scientists versus those ecstatic conservatives. Yet time may allow analysts to examine the discovery in the context of how it threatens the interests that have tied their politics to embryonic stem-cell research.

In a balanced news article on the new research last week, Tribune science writer Jeremy Manier quoted Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, director of education at the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia.

"This approach provides medical advantages as well as clear moral advantages," Pacholczyk said. "That's an amazing development."