WHY WE DO WHAT WE DO

God created man in his image; in the divine image he created him; male and female he created them.

--Genesis 1:27

And one of them tested him by asking, "Teacher, which commandment is the greatest?" He said to him, "You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

--Matthew 23:35-39

God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next.

I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it, if I do but keep His commandments.

--from a prayer by John Henry Newman, recounted by Robert P. Lockwood in Our Sunday Visitor, April 6, 2003

Recently, the Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman ("Outlawing Science," 3/30/2003) railed against the U.S. House of Representatives having voted to outlaw human cloning. She writes: "As bioethicist Art Caplan says, 'The House vote reflects just one thing: the desire to get legal status for an embryo. This is the back door way to get it done. They want to get into law that you can't destroy an embryo because it is a person.' [M]odern science sees an embryo as a potential life or a blueprint for life. To say that a blueprint is a human being, says Caplan, is like saying that the lumber and nails at Home Depot are a house." [All italics added].

"Modern science," of course, sees no such thing. Dr. Caplan is either deliberately using a falsehood (what about the "ethics" part of bioethics?) or just willfully ignorant. A human embryo is not a "blueprint" but a creature embarked on the path of human growth and development. "Blueprints" don't grow and develop. An embryo requires only nutrition and a hospitable environment for development. Under the right conditions, the embryo will grow to adult size and shape and, ultimately, die. The researchers at universities and biotech companies know that, of course. "Blueprints" they can get easily in the form of genetic material from any cell with a nucleus, without going through the cumbersome process of cloning. They don't want "blueprints," they want stem cells from a growing embryo. And harvesting the stem cells kills the embryo. Hence our opposition.

If human growth were analogous to building a house, an embryo would have to employ a builder and make use of a "biological supply store" (analogous to Home Depot) to import cells suitable for making bone, arteries, lungs, etc. But the embryo employs no builder, and imports only nutrition. The analogy is completely wrong. The Caplans and the Goodmans of the "progressive" elite surely know this. That they use this falsehood speaks to their desire to mislead and obscure the truth. Why?

The answer is in Dr. Caplan's use of the phrase "back door way" with regards to efforts to ban cloning. "Back door" to what? In the minds of the Caplans and Goodmans it's the "back door way" to ban abortion. And that they don't want that to happen. For them everything is about abortion rights. And that is because for them the right to abortion is about the right to sex without consequences--no matter what. That requires access to abortion as birth control.

In the self-absorbed ways of the modern elite, they assume that since it is for them "all about sex," it must be so too for pro-lifers. If that were so, pro-lifers would not, for example, be in the forefront of the opposition to euthanasia in all its variants. (The pro-abortion media share this distorted view of pro-lifers. For them we are not pro-life but, narrowly, "anti-abortion"--because it's all about sex.) If "sex without consequences, no matter what" were the ruling principle, then it would make no sense to oppose the creation of embryos by cloning and killing them to get the stem cells. But pro-lifers are not narrowly focused on sex. We are about something much more fundamental than that.

First, we do make note of the scientific facts: the human life span starts with conception (either through fertilization or, in the case of cloning, somatic cell nuclear transfer); goes through various stages of development, growth, and decay; and ends in death. The important discontinuity in this sweeping arc is the beginning: the creation of a new individual. To speak of "potential" life at any stage of this life span is not a scientific statement, but the _expression of an ideological bias.

Second, we associate individual personhood with the creature so created. And that we hold to be true for the whole life span of a human being. Not to do so creates the opportunity to negate or withdraw personhood whenever it is to the convenience and advantage of somebody else. That current law does not clearly assign legal personhood in the same way does not mean that the matter is forever settled. The law reflects the limited scientific knowledge of an earlier age. It can and must be changed.

Third, we subscribe to the principle that personhood and human dignity are not contingent upon somebody else's consent and approval (as expressed in the pernicious slogan "every child, a wanted child"). The notion that others may decide at their convenience under what circumstances we are entitled to the protections arising from personhood and inherent human dignity is a danger to all of us at any stage of our life span.

To the believers among us, the scientific facts and philosophical principles are enlightened by Scripture: We are all created in God's image. We are commanded to love God and love our neighbor. In our neighbor we encounter God, for he is created in God's image--even at the embryonic stage. The agnostics among us at the very least reject the notion that our personhood is contingent upon others "wanting" us. To me they have, in the words of John Henry Newman, a mission: they "may never know it in this life, but shall be told it in the next." They are "preachers of truth," even when they are "not intending it" to be God's truth.