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Does the nation's leading pro-life organization oppose contraception?
Since 2007, the National Right to Life Committee has graded members of the House of Representatives on 10 votes. Of the first five, four were on stem cells; the other was on drug price controls. Of the most recent five, one was on abortion funding, another was on State Department appropriations, and three were on contraception. The scorecard is no longer primarily about abortion.
I'd like to think NRLC is anti-abortion, not anti-contraception. But when I apply its own standard, ignoring stated motives and focusing instead on the legislative record, I can't really defend it.
More here.
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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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Remember that bill in Georgia to restrict in vitro fertilization? The Associated Press thought it was dead. Surprise! The Georgia Senate revised it and passed it a week ago.
The bill is part of a nationwide project to regulate the emerging industry of embryo production. In one state or another—and then another and another—legislation will be filed to restrict IVF. The battles will be fought over which uses of preimplantation genetic diagnosis are acceptable. And these fights will be every bit as ugly as the preceding fights over abortion.
More here.
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Two arguments have persuaded the United States to fund stem-cell research using destroyed embryos. One is that the research will save lives. The other is that the embryos, left over from fertility treatments, will otherwise be wasted.
Both arguments are now being applied to fetuses.
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Is President Obama's decision to fund embryo-destructive stem-cell research purely scientific? Or is it also moral?
I say it's moral. So do two thinkers from opposite ends of the political spectrum. At the Hastings Center's Bioethics Forum, Daniel Callahan, a cofounder of the center, points out that supporters of stem-cell research have been wrong
to conflate opposition to stem cell research and a variety of other actions by the Bush administration. That administration was guilty of manipulating, or suppressing, scientific information on a wide range of issues, including global warming and sex education. I call that behavior patently anti-science as well as a misuse of government power. But its stem cell opposition did not encompass any distortion of the science of such research. That is not how it argued its case.
Meanwhile, in the Washington Post, Yuval Levin, a former executive director of Bush's bioethics council, argues that
science policy is not just a matter of science. Like all policy, it calls for a balancing of priorities and concerns, and it requires a judgment of needs and values that in a democracy we trust to our elected officials. ... To distort or hide unwelcome facts is surely illegitimate. But to weigh facts against societal priorities—economic, political and ethical—in making decisions is the very definition of policymakers' duty.
One reason I like these two guys is that they're clear-eyed critics of spin and self-delusion, even when the spin and delusion are coming from their own allies. On the relationship between science and politics, I particularly recommend Levin's new book, Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy. He's right that Obama's decision doesn't moot or end the debate about using embryos. So let's honor that debate by continuing it.
Levin quotes President Kennedy, who said that many modern problems require
very sophisticated judgments which do not lend themselves to the great sort of 'passionate movements' which have stirred this country so often in the past. Now they deal with questions which are beyond the comprehension of most men.
Against this "technocratic temptation," Levin argues for democratic oversight. In principle, I agree. But the comments I've received from readers about Obama's stem-cell decision worry me. Many people on both sides seem ill-informed or self-deluded about basic scientific questions. Liberals are denying the simple fact that human embryos are the beginnings of people. Conservatives are pretending that adult stem cells are more powerful than embryonic ones. If ordinary people want to govern science policy, they need to educate themselves so they can govern well.
(By the way: To all of you who protested that torture is different from stem-cell harvesting: Of course it is. That's the nature of comparisons: The things being compared differ in many respects. The similarity in this case is that on both issues, moral objections are being dismissed as interference in a purely technical question of saving lives. That, not the merits of stem-cell research, was the point of the article.)
Second, Levin writes that in announcing his decision on Monday, Obama "argued that to deny free rein to stem cell science is to ignore and reject the promise of science as such." The president "pledged that his administration would ‘make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology,'" and his executive order "omits any mention of ethical debate."
I think what happened Monday is more complicated than that. Based on the spin that came out of the administration over the weekend, I expected Obama to make exactly the argument Levin describes. But he didn't. Among other things, Obama said:
Many thoughtful and decent people are conflicted about, or strongly oppose, this research. I understand their concerns, and we must respect their point of view. But after much discussion, debate and reflection, the proper course has become clear. The majority of Americans ... have come to a consensus that we should pursue this research. That the potential it offers is great, and with proper guidelines and strict oversight, the perils can be avoided.
And:
I can also promise that we will never undertake this research lightly. We will support it only when it is both scientifically worthy and responsibly conducted. We will develop strict guidelines, which we will rigorously enforce, because we cannot ever tolerate misuse or abuse. And we will ensure that our government never opens the door to the use of cloning for human reproduction. It is dangerous, profoundly wrong, and has no place in our society, or any society.
Levin is right about Obama invoking facts over ideology. But that was in the context of Obama's memorandum on scientific issues generally.
It looks to me as though the administration hasn't resolved how it's going to treat these issues. The mentality Levin describes—burying moral objections and portraying embryo research as just another case of Bush's "war on science"—pervades most of the spin coming out of the White House and its feeder institution, the Center for American Progress. That's why the White House paired the stem-cell order with the announcement on restoring scientific integrity. But for some reason, Obama himself isn't entirely playing along. His remarks on Monday 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. I think the administration is unresolved, and we should encourage it to acknowledge and grapple with the moral questions.
Third, Levin describes the moral question this way:
If (as modern biology informs us) conception initiates a human life, and if (as the Declaration of Independence asserts) every human life is equally deserving of some minimal protections, government support for the destruction of human embryos for research raises profound moral problems.
I cringe at this interpretation of the Declaration. Levin believes that equality means a 5-day-old embryo has the same right to life as a 5-year-old girl. I just can't buy that. I'm a gradualist. I value the 5-day-old embryo because it's on its way to becoming the 5-year-old girl. But it's not there yet. It hasn't acquired the sentience and cognition that characterize a full-fledged human being.
The Declaration says we're created with an unalienable right to liberty as well as life. But that hasn't stopped us from regulating liberties in proportion to maturity, as we do, for example, with curfews and driving. Why can't we exercise the same discretion with respect to life? Yes, life is a more basic right. But maybe that just means that instead of drawing lines after birth, as we do with liberty, we should confine our line-drawing about life to the period before birth.
Slippery slopes run both ways. Let's call that Human Nature's second law. If we don't draw moral lines against the exploitation of embryos, we may end up obliterating respect for human life generally. But if we're so afraid of that prospect that we refuse to draw lines permitting the use of any embryos under any conditions, we may end up obliterating the moral difference between embryos and full-grown people. Liberals should think seriously about the first scenario. Conservatives should think just as seriously about the second.
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The same Bush-Rove tactics are being used today in the stem-cell fight. But they're not coming from the right. They're coming from the left. Proponents of embryo research are insisting that because we're in a life-and-death struggle—in this case, a scientific struggle—anyone who impedes that struggle by renouncing effective tools is irrational and irresponsible. The war on disease is like the war on terror: Either you're with science, or you're against it.
More here.
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Under a Georgia bill, if you're 39, your doctor is forbidden to fertilize more than two of your eggs per treatment cycle. Take all the hormones you can stand, make all the eggs you want, but you get two shots at creating a viable embryo, and that's it.
How does this restriction "protect the mother" and "reduce the risk of complications" for her? It doesn't. ... So why limit the number of embryos created per cycle? Because the bill's chief purpose isn't really to help women. It's to establish legal rights for embryos.
More here.
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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.
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Another good story from this morning's batch: Ivan Oransky of the Wall Street Journal writes about the development of a "biological pacemaker." He focuses on the work of researchers Ira Cohen and Michael Rosen:
By inserting genes into rat heart cells growing in a dish, they were able to create a beating pattern that was faster and more regular than had been seen before. ... [Their first step was] to load up a common cold virus with a pacemaker gene, and then used the virus to successfully infect heart cells in a dish. The infected cells ended up with the gene and began making a pacing current they had lacked. Next the scientists tried the technique in dogs with slow hearts. The gene transfer worked. Parts of the dogs' hearts that had been beating 25 to 40 times per minute were restored to a normal 60 beats per minute. ... [Later] they stitched pacemaker genes into adult stem cells, using a technique that doesn't require viruses, and then injected the altered cells into the heart. ... [W]hen the researchers tested the pacemaker stem cells in dogs for six weeks, the cells behaved just as they hoped. As a precaution, the researchers showed that they could turn off a cellular pacemaker if it becomes hyperactive with a drug ...
This is a great illustration of the point I was trying to make two weeks ago about the superiority of flesh-based technology. First we had flesh but no pacemakers. If your heart lost it rhythm, you had no backup. Now we have electronic pacemakers. They solve the problem of unreliable flesh, but they introduce the problems of electronics. Inserting them requires surgery. Their batteries are finite, and, as we learned from the Medtronic fiasco, their wires can fail. Worse, like other electronic devices, they can be hacked -- in this case, with potentially lethal results.
The long-term solution is flesh. Unlike electronics, flesh can be grown inside your body, avoiding the need for surgery. It's self-correcting, self-repairing, and self-renewing in a way that electronics aren't. And there isn't an easy way to hack somebody else's genes -- at least, not yet. For the same reason, we do need a way to remotely reset your biological pacemaker if it runs out of control. That's where the aforementioned drug comes in. But if you're in the pacemaker market, you had that problem already.
Oransky ends with a wonderful quote from Cohen: "Just like Lasik is a better solution than eyeglasses, a biological pacemaker would be a better solution than an electronic one." Having written about Lasik before, I like the analogy. At the time, I saw Lasik as a potential enhancement of human powers, with athletes boosting their vision beyond 20/20. But as Cohen points out, you can also look at it the other way: Instead of outfitting you with gizmos we've come to think of as normal -- glasses or contacts -- we just fix your flesh. Sometimes the most effective technology is also the most natural.