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What’s Wrong with the World is dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the Jihad and Liberalism...read more

What's wrong with fetal tissue research

In this entry I told in detail the sorry tale of how fetal tissue research, and federal funding for it, dropped off the American political landscape with the election of George W. Bush and his decision to fund fetal tissue research.

For that reason, and oddly, I'm a bit heartened to see Wesley J. Smith stating the position I disagree with on this subject--namely, that aborted fetal tissue research is ethical. His bothering to state that position is itself at least an acknowledgment that the question is worth discussing.

Smith argues that even if one considers abortion to be murder, it doesn't follow that aborted fetal tissue research is any different from the use of the organs of murder victims for transplant.

Well. That opens the whole question of whether vital organ transplant is ethical. I have real questions about that, ranging from worrisome analogies to cannibalism to serious questions about whether "whole brain death" ever actually occurs and whether it can be reliably detected in the absence of cardio-pulmonary death. But waive those. Really. Waive them.

For the sake of this entry, let's assume that it could be ethical under at least some circumstances to take organs for transplant from a murder victim.

So what's the difference? First (as I said in comments on Smith's entry), the aborted child is being murdered legally. Hence, the use of the fetal tissue is connected with an already socially somewhat approved and legal procedure. The use of the cells in beneficial medicine serves further to legitimize that killing procedure in the public mind. The analogy would be to taking organs from legal euthanasia victims or to taking organs in some futuristic scenario from disabled five-year-olds who have been legally killed in “clinics.”

Second, the organ donor has been at least for some period of time treated as a patient, even if he was a murder victim. He was brought to the ER, where at first he was a patient before he was declared to be "wholly brain dead" for transplant. And, at least in theory, there was no collusion between those who killed him and those who planned to use his organs. The aborted child has not ever been treated as a patient. His body is delivered to the scientists or to middlemen by his murderers. Josephine Quintavalle points out here that abortionists deliberately kill children in ways likely to preserve their brain tissue when they know that the tissue will be used for research.

The medical professionals doing this particular research knew in advance that their tiny fellow humans would be killed, will have asked permission from the mothers involved, and will have made every effort to ensure that the brain tissue was harvested according to their exact scientific requirements.

Compare a situation, then, in which a murderer, wanting to help humanity, drops off the cadaver of his victim at a lab, where it is used for dissection or murders his victims according to scientific specifications so that their organs can be used. Or compare a situation in which a political prisoner's organs are donated when he is executed. Note: Let's just pretend that the government really was going to execute the political prisoner anyway but is simply careful to do it in such a way that organs can be donated. In these scenarios, the humanity of the victim has never been recognized at any point in the process, and the use of the victim’s body for donation is part of the dehumanization in the entire process from planning murder to actual murder to body use.

Third, there has always been some consequential concern that some women will be more likely to have abortions if they believe that the abortion might "do some good." According to this article,

A 1995 survey by the Joint Centre for Bioethics at the University of Toronto found that, among women who would consider having an abortion, 17 percent would be more likely to undergo an abortion if fetal tissue could be donated for medical use.

Fourth, there is the issue of compensation. I do not imagine that the abortionists Quintavalle mentions are carefully removing fetal heads with brain tissue intact just because they want to be benefactors to humanity. Some years ago there was quite a flap (see here and here, for example) about how the payment of "costs" for fetal bodies actually amounts to compensation and trafficking. This raises very real questions about complicity of researchers in the act of the abortionist by means of, in essence, purchasing the murder victim from the murderer, something that does not happen in the case of older murder victims.

All of this has been said before, said better, and said at more length, back in the 1990's when mainstream pro-lifers were still talking frequently about the matter. I applaud Wesley J. Smith's moral seriousness in bringing up the question, though I disagree with him. He, at least, does not think it does any harm from time to time to re-open serious ethical questions that were supposedly decided and conceded, even by pro-lifers, long ago.

Comments (20)

I think a good analogy is the Burke and Hare murders, where they explicitly murdered people so that they could sell the corpses to doctors. And were rightly condemned for it.

Sorry, the link I submitted was broken. Here's a corrected one: link

Brett, what people will _say_ is that these are elective abortions where the woman has already decided to have the abortion. Hence my analogy to condemned political prisoners. Okay, so these totally innocent people (let's say) are already doomed by their tyrannical government. Isn't it an additional odious action for said government to collect the organs when it kills the prisoners? I say yes, and I suspect someone like WJS would agree, so I think he shd. agree concerning aborted children. The "the decision has already been made" argument just isn't decisive, by any means.

Isn't it an additional odious action for said government to collect the organs when it kills the prisoners?

I don't quite see that. (Well, under the hypothesis that we can actually tell when someone is dead while the organs are still worth harvesting). If the government can take away a person's life, taking away their dead body is hardly of significance.

Aside from that, a smart government could market the idea as a voluntary choice: "hey, you were an ABSOLUTE JERK when you had your freedom, so bad that we have to kill you, but now you have the opportunity to offer your organs for the good of others, and redeem yourself to some extent: wouldn't you want to have a few people asking God to bless you every day of their lives?" (Presumably, this campaign would not add in: "Oh, and by the way, the alternative is that we use them for experiments and then feed them to lab rats.")

If the abortionists could not profit from the organs harvested (say they were required to be turned over to a separate agency), and if the abortionists were required to use organ-preserving techniques whether the tissues were going to be used or not, one might try to make the case that there is nothing that immediately connects the abortion act with the use made later on with the tissues. But in reality, the circle exists, and the politics of abortion would inevitably smear over into the politics of the use of the tissues and vice versa, so that the latter would be corrupted by taint of the abortion industry.

I actually think that Bush made one good point in his rule on the use of fetal stem cells: the circle got broken, because no ongoing harvesting of cells was allowed for the research. In other words, there could be no further incentive to continue taking cells just for the research.

Did I ever mention that I have a perfect replacement for the death penalty? Offer to death row inmates to become lab experiments. After 3 or 4 really dangerous ones, they earn their way off death row. (Unless they have been sentenced to 5 life terms, of course - then it takes 5 times as much.) And, of course, if you don't want to be an experiment, we can go back to the old way, that's fine too.

If the government can take away a person's life, taking away their dead body is hardly of significance.

Remember, I stipulated that this is a political prisoner. In other words, and as my comment to Brett made even clearer (I now see) than in the main post, these are *innocent people* being murdered by (let's say) a Communist government for opposing the government.

Yes, it is to my mind an additional insult to the prisoner's humanity for the government to sell his body parts after murdering him.

I have to admit that I also have a problem with doing this to actual criminals, though I have no problem with executing them. But I left that out, because we were starting with the situation in which Smith had said, "Suppose you consider abortion to be murder..." so I needed my prisoner example to be that of a murder.

Smith argues that even if one considers abortion to be murder, it doesn't follow that aborted fetal tissue research is any different from the use of the organs of murder victims for transplant.

That analogy's flawed for all the reasons you mention, but it seems to me you're cutting Smith an awful lot of slack. The notion that we shouldn't let a legal baby-killing go to waste sounds pretty horrific. Isn't this fruit of the poisonous tree?

One may not do evil that good may come from it. This whole idea is a non-starter.

The Chicken

Tony

Cruel and unusual? Cruel possibly --- unusual, certainly! (-;

Graham

An interesting scenario arose in Britain in 1999. A terminally ill white man wished to donate his organs once he was legally dead. However, he stipulated that his organs could only be given to a white patient.

The Health Service, quite correctly, refused to participate in an act of racism. The organs could have saved lives. But the means of obtaining the organs - acquiescence in racism - was too high a price for the NHS to pay.

Graham

Graham: it isn't conceived as a punishment at all, it's an opportunity to get out of punishment. Purely voluntary, you don't have to participate. But that aside, I ran into a Constitutional (historical) scholar last year, and in the course of conversation he informed me that "unusual" as used in the legal parlance of the time meant exactly this: a punishment not provided for in law. That's all. Nothing so obscure, subjective, or vacillating as "unusual" as used in common parlance for anything out of the ordinary.

Tony

I thought your suggestion was tongue in cheek. Hence the smiley.

If I were to offer a serious critique, I would say that your punishment 'instrumentalises' humans, and move on from there.

If you believe in "yuk" tests, then it probably fails those too.

Graham

Tony, I have to say that I absolutely do not agree with your idea re. prisoners. And I consider myself a hawk. I'm all on board with the death penalty. But I'm not on board with letting people get out of a just death penalty (not to mention being released again into society) by turning themselves into guinea pigs. There's a real problem with human dignity, there, IMO.

Physical molestation of air travelers in the name of security resides on the same continuum as experimentation on the unborn, death-row prisoners and other undesirables in the name of medical progress.

Lydia, I was thinking of experimentation that is the sort we WOULD like to do on people anyway, for medical purposes, and are CLOSE to being ready to do, but there is just a wee bit too much risk to ask the ordinary joe to take on without unusual conditions. But we already do allow slightly riskier experiments to be done on terminally ill patients who are testing a drug or procedure that may help them - they figure that if they are going to be dead in 4 months anyway, what's the great evil in trying a drug that might advance their death by a few weeks, but might stave it off for several months. A similar "unusual condition" holds, for something that has a bit too much risk but is potentially rewarding to the human community, for death row inmates. I am not talking about experiments like the Nazis for hypothermia. I am talking about the things that NIH had to debate about and only turned down for ordinary persons after hemming and hawing about it - things that are within the realm of possible experiments anyway. Heck, race car drivers and underwater welders, and miners undergo this level of risk (or more!) all the time for "mere money", why cannot we allow death row inmates to volunteer for it?

But we already do allow slightly riskier experiments to be done on terminally ill patients who are testing a drug or procedure that may help them

Right. Because it may help them. Hence the difference.

This is one of those places where I'm finding it rather difficult to do without the language of "using people as means." Perhaps Ed could help me out in finding suitably Thomistic language to explain why you are treating the heinous criminal as something less than human if you try to induce him to volunteer for risky experiments for "the good of the community" but are treating him fully as a human being if you take him out and hang him as just punishment for his evil doings. But I'm quite sure that is true.

Offer to death row inmates to become lab experiments. After 3 or 4 really dangerous ones, they earn their way off death row.

This proposal could be the basis for a wildly successful reality TV show.

I was thinking of experimentation that is the sort we WOULD like to do on people anyway, for medical purposes

Of course.

Heck, race car drivers and underwater welders, and miners undergo this level of risk (or more!) all the time

Who needs NASCAR after Doctor Moreau and the Wheel of Fortune hit Death Row?

Lydia, I too have reservations about the idea in terms of practical morality: how do you prevent the "opportunity" from devolving into a mere politically driven usage of persons where the voluntariness is a pure sham? That problem is real. And I wouldn't suggest the idea other than as a theory unless I had an answer to that.

But as a matter of simple fact, our society has done this kind of stuff all the time in the past. Maybe it wasn't quite the good idea we thought it was in the past, but we have done it: "You can either do hard time in the pen, or you can go into the Marines, you have 10 minutes to decide." I am sure that this sort of option was justified on the principle that the person making the choice is making his own personal choice, where one option is simply the just punishment, and the other option has some inherent, noble, community-service dignity to it, and can TRULY be a better objective choice. (I.e. the options are (a) mere justice, and (b) better than mere justice, for the criminal). The fact that the community that offers the option may have some utilitarian motivations may be bad for the community (especially if those utilitarian motives become paramount over the good of persons), but the mere offer of an option itself (where one option is dangerous) is not in principle a morally evil thing to the criminal receiving the offer. It is not in principle an example of using a person as an object, as would be an offer to someone to pay them for sex. There is nothing intrinsically demeaning about a person willing to make themselves available for dangerous activity that serves a community good. We think it is noble to make that kind of offer for fighting in the military, or for fighting fires, each of which has a higher probability of resulting in death or dismemberment. It cannot be demeaning to personhood to offer it for the possibility of curing disease, even if it too has a high risk of death or other physical damage.

As a cautionary note to the Catholics here, I would recall that one of the ways of carrying out an extremely laudable act of work of mercy in the middle ages was to offer yourself to redeem and replace a captive slave of the Muslims. It is an utterly demeaning thing to be MADE a slave, but to offer to become one for the sake of another is the very opposite of doing something offensive to your own personhood.

Right. Because it may help them. Hence the difference.

Right. Just like, if you offer enough money (and life insurance) to the underwater welder, it helps him, enough to offset the danger that he must undergo, in a rational risk/reward evaluation. And the pay we offer to firefighters - that pay also helps them. The danger willingly accepted need not be for some result that itself helps the person undergoing the danger.

if you try to induce him to volunteer for risky experiments

That's the crux, isn't it? If your offer is a facade, a sham arrangement where the other alternative either isn't a real alternative (say, we never really carry out the death penalty), or isn't just in itself (say, where we put you on death row for mere third degree murder with mitigating circumstances because we need more experimental fodder), then yes, of course our act is "inducing" him to "volunteer". But if we as a society are neutral to whether he chooses A or B, or if we are truly offering A and B when A is the natural just punishment alternative that he would have gotten had B not been an option, then it isn't really trying to "induce" him to "volunteer", any more than trying to get your neighbor to sell you his car by offering a higher price than you quoted yesterday is scare-quote "inducing" him to "willingly" sell it. If you really offer him a good enough option, he really does will to take you up on it and take the offer willingly.

Oh, by the way, the idea isn't that the murderer gets out of jail free after his 3 or 4 risky experiments, the idea is that he gets off death row. He is still subject to punishment. You can say that he merits the commutation of the death penalty itself (justly deserved for taking the lives of others) by his putting his own life (and health) at risk for the sake of others.

No need for the cautionary note to Catholics. A death row inmate submitting to 3-4 dangerous experiments in exchange for the commutation of his death sentence is not a corporal act of mercy. Instead, it is the State dressing up the culture of death in a grotesque parody of piety.

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