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EXCERPT:
"Some Protestant Reflections"
August 10, 2001 Episode no. 450
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Read an excerpt from Lutheran ethicist Gilbert Meilaender's essay on the stem cell debate, "Some Protestant Reflections," forthcoming in THE HUMAN EMBRYONIC STEM CELL DEBATE: SCIENCE, ETHICS, AND PUBLIC POLICY, edited by Suzanne Holland, Karen Lebacqz, and Laurie Zoloth (MIT Press):
We face the fact that procuring embryonic stem cells for research requires destruction of the embryo. Hence, we cannot avoid thinking about its moral status.
No doubt it is, in our society, impossible to contemplate this question without feeling sucked back into the abortion debate, and we may sometimes have the feeling that we cannot consider any other related question without always ending up arguing about abortion. Perhaps there is something to that, and I will not entirely avoid it myself, but the question of using (and destroying) embryos in research is a separate question. The issue of abortion, as it is framed in our society's debate and in Supreme Court decisions, turns chiefly on a conflict between the claims of the fetus and the claims of the pregnant woman. It is precisely that conflict, and our seeming inability to serve the woman's claim without turning directly against the life of the fetus, that is thought to justify abortion. But no such direct conflict of lives is involved in embryo research. Here, as in so many other areas of life, we must struggle to think inclusively rather than exclusively about the human species, about who is one of us, about whose good should count in the common good we seek to fashion. The embryo is, I believe, the weakest and least advantaged of our fellow human beings, and no community is "really strong if it will not carry its ... weakest members" (Karl Barth).
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This is not an understanding shaped chiefly in the fires of recent political debate; rather, it has very deep roots in Christian tradition. ... We have become accustomed in recent years to distinguishing between persons and human beings, to thinking about personhood as something added to the existence of a living human being, and to debating where to locate the time when such personhood is added. However, a much older concept of the person, for which no threshold of capacities is required, was deeply influential in Western history and had its roots in some of the most central Christian affirmations. [In the view of early Christian thinkers], a person is not someone who has a certain set of capacities; a person is simply, as Anglican theologian Oliver O'Donovan put it, a "someone who" -- a someone who has a history. That story, for each of us, begins before we are conscious of it and, for many of us, may continue after we have lost consciousness of it. It is nonetheless our personal history even when we lack awareness of it, even when we lack or have lost certain capacities characteristic of the species. Each story is the story of "someone who," as a living human being, has a history. ... Starting from that very point, [Christian thinkers] opened up for us a vision of the person that carries deep human wisdom, that refuses to think of personhood as requiring certain capacities, and that therefore honors the time and place of each someone who has a history. In honoring the dignity of even the weakest of living human beings -- the embryo -- we come to appreciate the mystery of the human person and the mystery of our own individuality.
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