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The most interesting moment in President Obama's Tuesday night press conference is something you won't pick up from the transcript. You have to watch the video. Forty-six minutes in, John Ward of the Washington Times asks Obama about stem cells. Obama replies:
[I]t is very important for us to have strong moral guidelines, ethical guidelines, when it comes to stem cell research or anything that touches on, you know, the issues of possible cloning or issues related to, you know, the human life sciences. I think those issues are all critical, and I've said so before. I wrestle with it on stem cell; I wrestle with it on issues like abortion.
What the transcript doesn't convey is that after saying "anything that touches on," it takes Obama a full 15 seconds of stumbling, stalling, and groping before he finds the phrase "human life sciences."
Obama, unlike President Bush, knows his way around the English language. He doesn't stumble, stall, or grope for lack of words. He does it because he was about to say something but decided not to say it. The giveaway here is that he eventually settles on the phrase "human life sciences," which I've never heard before from a politician. Supporters of embryonic stem-cell research talk about "life sciences." Opponents talk about "human life." Neither side likes to focus on the other's magic word: human for pro-lifers or sciences for research proponents.
I think Obama settled on "human life sciences" because he was originally going to say "anything that touches on human life." And he decided at the last minute that he'd better not say that, because that would buy into the other side's framing of the issue and get him into trouble. The human-life frame, planted by Ward, was clearly in Obama's head, as evidenced by his next sentence: "I wrestle with it on stem cell; I wrestle with it on issues like abortion." But strategically, you're not supposed to accept the other side's frame. Once you group stem-cell research with abortion, you're giving away the fight. You're supposed to group stem-cell research with the Bush administration's deceptions about abstinence and global warming. It's all part of the "Republican war on science." So, after his 15 seconds of groping, Obama splits the difference and comes up with the phrase "human life sciences."
We saw the same thing two weeks ago, when Obama lifted the ban on federal funding of stem-cell research using destroyed human embryos. Most research proponents, including his own aides, stuck to the "science" message and didn't mention moral objections. But Obama did mention them. His remarks sounded a lot like what he has said about abortion and other social issues: acknowledging moral disagreement while striving for consensus or at least compromise.
On Tuesday, after Obama's initial answer, Ward asked a follow-up: "Do you think that scientific consensus is enough to tell us what we can and cannot do?" Obama replied: "No. I think there's—there's always an ethical and a moral element that has to be—be a part of this."
Obama, like the rest of us, is grappling with how to think about biotechnology. We're all familiar with social, financial, public-safety, and health-care issues. But this is a new kind of issue: It's moral, economic, and life-and-death. To some of us, it's about life sciences. To others, it's about embryonic human life. It took Obama 15 seconds to put the two perspectives together in words. If it takes him eight years to put them together in practice, that'll be one hell of an achievement.
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Should parents go to jail for believing so devoutly in faith healing that they don't seek lifesaving medical treatment for their children?
Leilani and Dale Neumann of Wausau, Wis., will soon find out. Their 11-year-old daughter died of diabetic complications after they relied on prayer rather than doctors to heal her. Now they face trial for reckless endangerment and a potential prison sentence of 25 years. They're the third couple slapped with criminal charges in the last year for failing to seek treatment for a child. In today's New York Times, Dirk Johnson reports:
About 300 children have died in the United States in the last 25 years after medical care was withheld on religious grounds, said Rita Swan, executive director of Children's Health Care Is a Legal Duty ... Criminal codes in 30 states, including Wisconsin, provide some form of protection for practitioners of faith healing in cases of child neglect and other matters ...
Swan lost her own son after failing to seek prompt medical attention. She says she waited, catastrophically, because she thought "once we went to the doctor, we'd be cut off from God." The Neumanns seem to have been under the same impression. Johnson reports that they're "followers of an online faith outreach group" (on the Web here) that includes, among other things, an essay preaching that "Jesus never sent anyone to a doctor or a hospital. Jesus offered healing by one means only! Healing was by faith."
I don't know how the case will turn out. But the more important thing to communicate to parents is that this is bad religion. Science is a way of grappling with what we can know empirically. Religion is a way of grappling with what we can't. Each of these disciplines must recognize its limits and defer, beyond that, to its counterpart. Properly understood, there's nothing unscientific about religion, and there's nothing irreligious about science.
I'm not saying the distinction is perfectly clean. It isn't. Sometimes religion and science have to work together. But it's crucial to ask which kind of question you're facing. Healing is a physical phenomenon. Can faith influence it? Yes. Look at the latest study on acupuncture: It sometimes works, apparently because patients believe in it. But what happens when people pray for your recovery without you knowing about it? Answer: Nothing. Belief, not God, is the medically salient factor.
That's how science, at its best, works with religion. It doesn't claim to disprove God's existence. It can't. It addresses only empirically testable ideas, including faith healing. And it reports whatever its methods find. Instead of laughing at acupuncture, it looks at the evidence, admits that acupuncture sometimes works, and tries to figure out why.
Religion, at its best, needs the same humility. God isn't stupid. He doesn't give you a hammer and insist that you bang nails with your head. If this is his world, then so are the tools he has given you: doctors, medicine, and your brain. In the time of Jesus, most people died in childhood. Do you want to go back to that? Do you think that those deaths were God's will—but that today's long lives, made possible by modern medicine, aren't?
As medicine advances, difficult moral questions will arise. If failure to seek available treatment is reckless endangerment, what happens when the available treatment comes, for example, from destroying embryos to get stem cells? Can you be jailed for refusing to give your daughter treatment that's based on what you regard as killing? Or take embryo screening: Already, it has advanced to the point where parents who make babies the old-fashioned way, with all its risks, are seen as "inflicting" genetic maladies on their kids.
But taking your gravely ill child to the doctor isn't one of those tough calls. God doesn't hate doctors. He made them. Want to show your faith? Use what he gave you.