Brown, Carolyn. “Stem Cell Tourism Poses Risks.” Canadian Medical Association Journal, v.184/2 (February 2012).
Dennis, Carina. “China: Stem Cells Rise in the East.” Nature, v.419 (2002).
Fink, Cassandra, Pamela Garcia-Filion, and Mark Borchert. “Failure of Stem Cell Therapy to Improve Vision in Children With Optic Nerve Hypoplasia.” Journal of AAPOS, October 2013.
Liao, Lianming, Lingsong Li, and Robert Chunhua Zhao. “Stem Cell Research in China.” Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society, v.362/1482 (June 29, 2007).
Qiu, Jane. “China Special: The Backbone of Spinal Research.” New Scientist, v.2629 (November 7, 2007).
Shirk, Susan L. China: Fragile Superpower. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
“US Stem Cell Research in Robust Health.” New Scientist, July 13, 2011. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128212.800-us-stem-cell-research-in-robust-health.html.
“Wild East or Scientific Feast?” The Economist, January 14, 2010. http://www.economist.com/node/15268869.
Xie, Xiaojie and Jian-an Wang, eds. Mesenchymal Stem Cells for the Heart: From Bench to Bedside (Advanced Topics in Science and Technology in China). New York: Springer, 2009.
Zhang, Joy Yueyue. The Cosmopolitanization of Science: Stem Cell Governance in China. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Christianity
Christianity
214
217
Christianity
There are two types of stem cells: adult stem cells and embryonic stem cells. Adult stem cell research is decades old and has shown the efficacy of stem cell treatment for autoimmune diseases, heart disease, leukemia, and cancer. Adult stem cells are harvested from blood, brain, or skin tissue, body fat, and living bone marrow, as well as umbilical cord blood and placental tissue. For Christians left and right the matter is settled, not a matter of controversy. Adult stem cells are good, and research should continue, perhaps accelerate. However, there is major controversy over the use of embryonic stem cells, those harvested from human embryos in a process that entails destruction of the embryo.
Pro-abortion groups, drug and research companies, and others support the research. But the Roman Catholic bishops in the United States oppose immoral, illegal, and unnecessary violation of the sanctity of life, which they believe begins at conception. The Southern Baptist Convention and the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod also define embryos as tiny human beings. The Presbyterian Church USA accepts research when the ends are unattainable by other means and compelling.
The Bible backs easing of suffering and curing of disease and the general struggle to cure physical ailments. Jesus’s ministry involved a significant amount of healing. Luke was a physician. The emergence of regenerative medicine and stem cell research, with many groups seeking new ways to harvest stem cells and evaluate stem cell flexibility to create many types of adult cells, has raised a question in the Christian community. The question is not of legality, for stem cell research is clearly within the law, and not of cost effectiveness, because stem cell research can probably generate more economical treatments and cures. Rather, the issue is one of morality. What would God have us do?
The Debate
At the center of the debate over stem cells is the issue of the value of human life at its beginning. Stem cells are blank cells with the capability of becoming any of 210 different types of human tissue, and researchers are seeking to use these cells to create cures for serious disease and to repair vital organs. Stem cells are common throughout the human body but most abundant in embryos. Unfortunately, it is necessary to kill the embryo to get the cells, and the national political debate is over whether tax money should support that killing.
Not only religious leaders but lay Christians are involved in the debate. In an instance of moral politics, Congress banned the use of tax dollars in research involving the killing or harming of embryos. Former President George W. Bush is more centrist; he agrees that experiments that require the killing of humans are wrong but accepts that those already destined to die are acceptable for use in research, including the aborted and the frozen embryos in fertility clinics. The Christian Right rebuts that two wrongs do not make a right, and benefiting from an immoral action is itself immoral. There is no room for compromise.
In the U.S. Senate, Sam Brownback (R-KS) contended that this is the first time in American history that medical researchers find it acceptable to kill one human to help another. The issue is the nature of the unborn being—whether an embryo is a human or a piece of property. Living beings have worth and dignity and a right to protection, under the law, from destruction or harm. If property, the embryo can be disposed of as its owner chooses, even destroyed.
When the National Institutes of Health (NIH), using a Bill Clinton administration legal opinion, proposed to use “spare” embryos from fertility clinics as a source of stem cells, the National Right to Life Committee responded, “If a law said no taxes may fund research in which porpoises are destroyed, and a federal agency then told its grantees to arrange for porpoises to be caught and killed for use in federally approved experiments, everyone would recognize this as illegal.” And Cardinal Adam Maida of Detroit contended that the use of taxpayer money for such human experiments made all taxpayers culpable.
Not all Christians are that extreme. Sondra Wheeler of Wesley Theological Seminary notes that some would even have problems with fertilization outside the human body because it is removed from the marital relationship. This is close to the Catholic position. Others say it is okay to create and fertilize but not to use the unneeded embryos; for them, store or share is the solution. And still others see a 15-day window for harvesting cells as long as the embryos are going to be destroyed anyway.
Lisa Sowle Cahill, Boston College theology professor, notes that the broad doctrines such as sin and creation and the fall should make humans more cautious about their own small activity. For her, the issue of whether an embryo is a person is a matter of philosophy rather than one of religion. She reads the Catholic Church as taking the position that philosophically there is no knowing when a life becomes a person but the embryo deserves the benefit of the doubt and extra protection just in case. She notes that for the affected woman, Christian or not, there is a difference between the embryo in the womb and the one in the lab, but for the church there is no difference.
The conservative Christian view allows no exception for laboratory-generated life, regarding the Petri dish and the fallopian tubes as the same. No embryo is surplus and, thus, none is available for research. Pro-life couples have the right to specify that no spares be conceived in in vitro fertilization. Orthodox couples routinely make this demand. With no surplus, there is nothing to destroy. And if by chance there are extras, then the right thing to do is store them for the future or donate them to other couples.
Pro-life groups oppose use of embryonic stem cells, as does the Vatican, which labels the practice “gravely immoral.”
