timeimmortal

…but creating one in real life, especially a half-human, half-animal hybrid, is not morally sound, nor does it seem all that defensible on scientific grounds. Yes, I will grant that it is possible that some great new advance in medicine might come about because of experimentation on hybrid embryos, but so what? Imperial Japan made some great leaps in the field of medical research back in the 1940s, but their methods included grotesque experimentation on Chinese prisoners. The desired ends do not justify the means by which they are achieved.

David Warren, in fine form as always, puts the proper perspective on the issue:

The current British prime minister, Gordon Brown — the one who did not win the last election, and with any luck, will not win the next one — is naturally among the advocates of the legislation his government tabled. In campaigning for it, he has made shameless emotional use of his own small child, who suffers from cystic fibrosis. He would not himself recognize it as shameless, of course, for he is wallowing in confusion over ends and means. But using his own son, Fraser, as his exhibit, he has very emotionally declared that the creation of hybrid animal/human embryos for research purposes is “an inherently moral endeavour, that can save and improve the lives of thousands and over time, millions.”

…Gordon Brown was uttering an untruth. As even the leading “expert” advocate of the government’s measures — Lord Robert Winston, the English fertility specialist, politician, and television personality — has admitted, there is no pressing need for animal/human hybrid embryos. He had already said that the loss of the hybrid clause “won’t fundamentally alter the science of stem cell biology.” The research could perfectly well go on with adult stem cells, to the use of which there is no moral objection. Even the Catholic Church has contributed directly and materially to that research.

An emotional argument has thus been made, and accepted as perfectly legitimate, where “the end justifies the means.” But where an opponent of the evil means speaks “emotively” in defence of a moral absolute, he is dismissed as lowering the tone of the debate.

We are most certainly dealing with a moral absolute in this case. Our entire civilization (including e.g. all legal codes throughout the Western world) depends upon the sharp and unambiguous distinction between what is human, and what is not. We do not abandon this “front line” without inevitably lapsing into the kind of barbarism of which fascist-era Germany and Japan served as terrible warnings.

Alas, we already crossed this line, in 1967 in Britain, in 1969 in Canada, when abortion was legalized. The definition of what is human, that is extremely sharp in nature, was made legally vague. The sharp line in nature can only correspond to human conception. From that moment of conception, a woman is carrying a baby, not some inhuman “thing” that becomes “relatively more human” with the progression of time. Ignore that sharp line, and no other line can be drawn and held. By comparison, childbirth itself provides no precision whatever, for a child may be born many weeks prematurely, and still survive and flourish.

Evil ultimately only begets evil; that is why the Church constantly cautions against using evil means that good ends may come from it. Though the campaigners for abortion “rights” were doubtless driven by what was, in at least some of their minds, a desire to do “good” — in providing something that was, in their view, of benefit to women, and a tool of emancipation moreover — the ends they have achieved have far surpassed any gains that might have emerged.

Equality and suffrage for women good ends that have emerged from feminism, but these ends could have been achieved without abortion, and might even have been sweeter victories had history played out in that way. As it is, though, what gains feminism has made in terms of expanding the rights and role of women in society have been more or less counteracted — if not erased entirely — by the fact that our society, more than any other, objectifies women in ways that would have been unimaginable to our “patriarchal” forebears. It’s a common charge that the women of old were valued only for their ability to make babies. Even assuming that’s an accurate statement, it seems that in the modern day women are valued for even less than that — indeed, the ability of women to become pregnant is seen by many as something which needs to be corrected for. Our modern society regards women, essentially, as a means of consequence-free gratification.

And it should come as no surprise, then, that our modern, enlightened, post-Christian society thus regards human life in general as something expendable, and as something which can be tampered with willy-nilly at its earliest stages in pursuit of murky, uncertain, and rather unlikely scientific ends. Experimenting on embryos is, to be sure, different than experimenting on Chinese prisoners, but only in the sense that the embryos are at an earlier stage of development. The same disregard for certain categories of human life is still present. And creating human-animal hybrids does not remove that particular moral dilemma; it adds to it.

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