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Real Ethics
THE SHOUTING MATCH WITH FUNDAMETALISTS HAS OBSCURED IMPORTANT MORAL ISSUES RAISED BY STEM CELL RESEARCH
Framed by the abortion controversy, the moral debates over embryonic stem cell (ESC) research have largely focused on whether an embryo should legally be considered life. But for bio-ethicists such as R. Alta Charo and Gaymond Bennett, the moral issues are more complex.
The moral nuances that Charo (a member of President Clinton’s Bioethics Advisory Commission and visiting professor at Boalt Hall in 2006) and Bennett (a doctoral student in bioethics at the Graduate Theological Union) address rarely make it to the airwaves. But as the science progresses, these are just some of the questions researchers must wrestle with: From whom should embryos be harvested? How systematically should they be sought? Should donors be paid? And what kind of protections should they be afforded, especially because many people consider existing practices in the fertility industry flawed?
Equally important are issues of equitable access to the benefits of ESC research. Bennett worries that the poor historically have lacked access to new medical technology. The difficulty that certain ethnic groups have encountered in obtaining transplant matches, for example, could be repeated in their access to treatments derived from stem cell research.
Within the public, suspicions about the ultimate effect of stem cell research are still a major concern, partly because a procedure used, nuclear cell transfer, is also used in cloning. But both Charo and Bennett think that fears about scientists creating a “Brave New World”—the eugenically engineered caste society described in Aldous Huxley’s sci-fi classic—are exaggerated. Charo believes the current president’s Council on Bioethics is overly concerned with “the ways in which technology will somehow dehumanize us.”
Although religion often is seen as the primary opposition to stem cell research, according to Bennett, Christians dissent on the importance of protecting embryos. “I speak in churches a lot, and most people I talk to are excited by the possibility of stem cell research and frustrated by the fact that more public voice hasn’t been given by theologians to why stem cell research helps us fulfill a mandate to love and care for the world."
The current tone of public debate worries Bennett for another reason. “It reinforces the easy rhetoric about a war between science and religion,” he says. He also says he has heard some scientists claim that if it weren’t for religious people, research could move ahead.
Charo, a self-professed Jewish liberal, is skeptical that religion should play a role in the debate at all. “If we base our positions solely on religious assertions, then somebody who doesn’t share our religious beliefs can’t possibly be persuaded to share our conclusions. It begins to deteriorate into a debate about whose God is better, my God or yours?” Bennett, on the other hand, believes that, because most Americans are religious, looking to secularism as a means of mediating all conflict is naïve. “The effort to exclude religion from public discourse on this set of issues is just wasted energy,” he says.
But both Charo and Bennett agree the public debate over the research should widen to include more views. Says Bennett, “Why should our ethics be any less sophisticated than the very science that we’re thinking about?”
—Lygia Navarro |
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