Time Immortal

British scientists are ready to turn female bone marrow into sperm, cutting men out of the process of creating life.

The breakthrough paves the way for lesbian couples to have children that are biologically their own.

Gay men could follow suit by using the technique to make eggs from male bone marrow. [but there's still the whole problem of carrying the child; I guess gay men will never truly be able to have a baby all their own -- Ken]

Researchers at Newcastle upon Tyne University say their technique will help lead to new treatments for infertility.

But critics warn that it sidelines men and raises the prospect of babies being born through entirely artificial means.

The research centres around stem cells - the body’s ‘mother’ cells which can turn into any other type of cell.

According to New Scientist magazine, the scientists want to take stem cells from a woman donor’s bone marrow and transform them into sperm through the use of special chemicals and vitamins.

There is one upshot to this field of research:

Taking stem cells from an adult donor — possibly a cancer patient — removes the ethical problems associated with using embryos.

Does it? I guess, in one sense, yes…although given other recent developments, there is always the possibility of new ethical problems emerging. Because I’m sure nobody would ever think to harvest bone marrow and stem cells from cancer patients without their express approval, right?

My goodness but these are strange times we live in. Whatever happened to having a baby the normal way…you know, the biologically normal way? One guy, one girl, sexual intercourse…you know, the way every other mammal does it?

Oh, right…that’s why we have abortion.

But in our secularism-addled world, the bloody obvious has become both foreign and, for many, outright controversial.

Pope Benedict XVI on Thursday defended the Vatican�s right to speak out on bioethics, including its opposition to artificial procreation methods and embryonic stem cell research.

He also dismissed criticism that the Roman Catholic Church blocks scientific progress.

“Church teaching certainly cannot and must not weigh in on every novelty of science, but it has the task to reiterate the great values which are on the line and to propose to faithful and all men of good will ethical-moral principles and direction for new, important questions,” Benedict said.

Benedict brushed off those who criticize the church “as if it were an obstacle to science and to humanity�s true progress.”

The pope singled out as “new problems” the freezing of embryos, selecting which embryos should be implanted after testing them for defects, research on embryonic stem cells and attempts at human cloning.

He decried them as proof that “the barrier protecting human dignity has been broken.”

Science and religion can be fully harmonized; there are no fundamentally irreconcilable issues between the two. That’s not to say that the two won’t sometimes come into conflict, but it is to say that the true issue is not that science and religion come into conflict, but where they come into conflict.

evolution vs. creation? That’s not an issue — the theory of evolution and the belief that God created all things are fully compatible with each other, in the same way that one can simultaneously acknowledge both the carpenter and the hammer and nails. The business of Religion is not to tell us, as Galileo so nicely put it, “how the heavens go”, but instead to tell us how to get to Heaven. And the business of science is the reciprocal of that, to tell us how the heavens go. More importantly, the business of heaven is not to serve as the defining basis for moral standards, except through the framework of natural law.

The problem — the conflict, if the Reader will permit the use of such a clunky term — arises when scientific study strays into fields that flirt with, or jump headlong into, immoral practices. Stem cell research is the current example, with its tension between embryonic and adult stem cells. Obviously, embryonic stem cells are theoretically more versatile and useful, but they can only be obtained by processes which are destructive to fertilized embryos. The Chuch’s position (which, interestingly, is defensible solely on the principles of biology) is that embryos are human beings, given that they are living organisms of the species homo sapiens, and are genetically distinct from either parent (”parent” here taken to mean the donors who contributed sperm and egg to the researchers).

It is the Church’s contention, then, that embryos, despite the absence of a recognizable human figure, are already fully human, and thus deserving of full human dignity…which includes the right to not be, in essence, cannibalized for parts against their will.

One would think that it would be obvious that the above issue is not a scientific one, but a moral one, and yet for many people the fog of secularism has rendered those two categories indistinguishable from one another. That’s a pity…and it’s why, I think, the Pope has to trouble himself to say something which, only a few years ago, would have been a bloody obvious thing.