Embryonic Stem Cell Research and Contraception

By Dr. Paul Chaim Schenck

Congress has taken up the debate over Embryonic Stem Cell Research (ESCR), and President Bush has indicated he will veto such legislation because it “goes against his beliefs.” While the President’s opposition is welcomed, and his stance is in accord with a Culture of Life, nevertheless it is important to understand that such research is still perfectly legal and is already being funded by the federal government, albeit in a limited capacity. Congress is now considering whether to provide additional funding for ESCR. Currently, ESCR, cloning and genetic manipulation are legally being researched by private companies, at public universities, and with state and federal funding.

It seems by now that most people know that Embryonic Stem Cell Research entails the destruction of human embryos for their stem cells. What is largely overlooked, and unknown, even among serious Christians, is the underlying philosophy that has allowed us to reach the place where we are permitting and even encouraging the creation of human life only to be used up and discarded.

There is a progression (or rather, regression) from the contraceptive mentality to abortion [1] to ESCR. Contraception is used to prevent the life from coming into being, so already there is a disposition against the child. This prepares the mind for the next step: if the contraception fails, the child is potentially viewed as an intruder, and so abortion is used to do what the contraception failed to do.

Abortion denies the child the transcendent value that is intrinsic to the human person. It makes the child disposable, and an unwanted possession. Possessions that are acquired or disposed of are actually commodities, and not persons of eternal worth. Human persons created in the image of God cannot be acquired, sold, transferred or destroyed. To do so is a sin against God and man. Yet, contraception redefines a child as a disposable object.

Once so defined, acquiring a child becomes a matter of technology employed, convenience or art. When the sexual act is divorced from the covenantal love of spouses united by the sacrament of Holy Matrimony, and from loving parents who have offered their lives to one another and to their children, then conception is turned into a contest to attain a desired object. In vitro fertilization, artificial insemination, surrogate motherhood, and embryo transfer and cloning are some ways that attempt to “acquire” a child. Each of these methods violates the divine purpose of conjugal love and the marriage covenant.   

These technologies employ the human body “as material for human manipulation, mutilation, or disposal rather than as a divine dimension of the nature of the human person." [2] Thus, the Imageo Dei is assaulted, and the dignity of the human person denied.

The Holy Father Pope John Paul II referred to this ideology as the new manachaeanism, relating it to the ancient false teaching that the body, separate and over against the soul, consists of “an independent principal against a good God.” He drew an analogy between this heresy and modern materialism that views the body as a “thing”, distinct from the personality.

This insidious dualism has a corrosive and destructive effect on the family. The bad fruit of it can be seen in the loss of confidence in marriage, and the lack of desire to marry, the dramatic increase in cohabitation without marriage, divorce, sterilization and abortion. Children who are “wanted” or acquired still suffer from the subconscious awareness that, had they been unwanted, they could have been deliberately prevented from being born. Even more disturbing are the “throw away” children who were conceived despite contraception and, though not aborted, are de-facto abandoned emotionally, physically or economically by their resentful parents.

This dreadful syndrome has introduced layers of deception into the very heart of human relations. The marriage bound family is the foundation of civilization, but contraception supplants this ideal with a radical autonomy. Members of a family learn the principal of divine love, which is seeking the best for the other at the expense of oneself; contraception expends the other for the best for oneself. Parents cooperate with God in the procreation of new life; contraception defies God and denies his creative love and power. In a marriage open to life, siblings learn to serve each other; contraception leads to serving oneself.

Not all contracepting couples consciously embrace each of these derogatory factors, but there is a kind of “aggregate” offense that occurs, certainly between themselves and their procreative potential, and thus their children. Furthermore, the denial of their divine purpose has a deleterious effect on the society of which they are an essential part, and it injures the Church, of which the family is the primary expression.

The Theology of the Body, as presented by John Paul II, sees in the embodied human person the fullness of the image of God. Genesis 2:24 indicates that man and woman are ordered toward each other; “…a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.” It is this unity between husband and wife that complements and completes God’s image in them. [3]

Though many fail to see the logical connection between condoms and diaphragms and Embryonic Stem Cell Research, cloning and genetic engineering, the premise is clearly there. When men and women reduce the most powerful, divine act of human relations to merely a biological expression in which the purpose is momentary physical pleasure, or focus only on the relational aspect of sexual union, but remain deliberately closed to life, they inadvertently make life into a product, an article of trade, to be disposed of or acquired.

Embryonic Stem Cell Research, driven by a misguided belief that one “underdeveloped” and otherwise unwanted life, can be the source of the betterment of another, more “mature” life, is a consequence of such a view of human sexuality. Cloning and genetic engineering are others. These processes lead to the use of new life to acquire a “desired product”; medical advances derived from expendable lives.

Another debate over medical research, which raged for years but has recently abated, is over the use of the Nazi death camp experiments. Ethicists have agreed, again until recently, that the data derived from heinous experiments conducted on extermination camp prisoners by private physicians comes at too great a cost. [4] The same standard must be applied to that which derives from the new form of exploitation – the creation of a new human life, only to be dissected, eviscerated, and disseminated to a variety of research facilities and subjects. Recently a journalist claimed that ESCR will lead to the cure of virtually every disease that troubles us. Notwithstanding this outrageous exaggeration, even such a grandiose outcome would not legitimate the creation of a human child only to harvest her tissues and organs and cause her death.     

Contraception is at the root of these sinister innovations, and as for abortion, ESCR, infanticide and euthanasia, it is the fruit of the same evil tree.    

ENDNOTES:

[1] Even the United States Supreme Court has recognized the direct link between contraception and the necessity of abortion as a backup in case of its failure. See Planned Parenthood V. Casey.
[2] Torracco, The Gospel of Life, 8-2.
[3] Torracco, Gospel of Life, 6-2.
[4] See Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, Medical killing and the psychology of genocide, (New York: Basic Books, 1988).
 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Paul Chaim Schenck is the director of the National Pro-life Action Center on Capitol Hill.  He is also a pastoral associate with Priests for Life.  This article was printed with permission from his website at www.nplac.org.