Washington
Like many, perhaps most folks, I’ve known couples who could not have children.
At their kitchen tables, on somber evenings, I heard about the false starts, surgeries and other invasive procedures they faced to ease the relentless ache.
And I’ve seen their joy on those sunny days when I held their babes at baptismal fonts. I’ve watched these miracle kids grow: devouring Harry Potter books, kicking soccer balls, making their first Communion. I’ve silently blessed the science that made it possible.
These families are universally embraced. No minister or congregation, not that I know of, stops young mothers at the church or synagogue door, demanding to know the fate of any surplus embryos.
Though many of us believe that life begins at conception, the doomed frozen embryos are the trade-off our society makes for the pealing glee of a child’s laughter, and fewer women crying, so alone at night.
Our government pondered two further trade-offs this summer, weighed the moral consequences, and took seemingly contradictory actions.
In one case, the Bush administration approved over-the-counter sales of Plan B, a morning-after birth control pill that could increase the number of aborted embryos.
In the other, the White House announced its opposition to a proposed new form of embryonic stem-cell research, which poses no new threat to embryos and might lead to medical breakthroughs.
In each controversy, new advances in science required fresh moral calculations.
Plan B is not an abortion pill like RU-486. It’s an emergency contraceptive: a souped-up birth control pill, rich with hormones, taken after sex to inhibit ovulation and fertilization.
The problem, according to the scientific literature, is that Plan B doesn’t always prevent conception. In an undetermined number of women, it works a few days later, by keeping the fertilized egg from lodging in the uterine wall.
To those of some faiths, who believe that life begins in the fallopian tubes at the moment of conception, not when there’s successful implantation in the uterus, taking Plan B can be tantamount to abortion.
Emergency contraception “can have an abortifacient effect by preventing implantation or survival of an embryo,” the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops told the Food and Drug Administration. “Its over-the-counter use would conflict with a trend in law and medicine that recognizes the human embryo as a human subject and patient deserving of protection.”
In this, Plan B is neither new, nor alone. Regular birth control pills and intra-uterine devices – even breast-feeding – are thought to inhibit implantation as well.
In the end, the apparent benefits of emergency contraception outweighed the toll. President Bush endorsed Plan B, and the FDA OK’d its sale without prescription for customers 18 and older.
The White House made a different moral calculation over federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research.
For years, scientists have been using surplus embryos from fertility programs to grow stem-cell colonies. These embryos were destroyed in the process.
For Bush, the costs of destroying embryos outweighed the yet-unproven hopes that stem-cell research will someday provide a cure for paralysis, diabetes, dementia and other afflictions. This summer, the president vetoed a bill that would have expanded federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research.
You would think, then, that the White House would cheer the news that researchers have found a way to grow embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos.
Doctors, for more than a decade, have been running genetic tests on human embryos at the earliest stages of development, seeking signs of hereditary disease. Only a single cell is needed for the testing, so the embryos can survive and become healthy children.
Last month, a Massachusetts biotech firm announced that the same process may be used to grow stem-cell colonies from a single extracted cell, leaving the embryos unharmed.
The stem-cell saga is littered with fakery, hype and phony breakthroughs. But if the new process proves out, it offers a solution to lawmakers tugged by rival demands of patients’ organizations and religious groups. By encouraging research on embryos that survive, the government might even save others from destruction.
The White House didn’t see it that way. “Any use of human embryos for research purposes raises serious ethical concerns. This technique does not resolve those concerns,” the administration said. “The president is hopeful that, with time, scientists can find ways of deriving cells like those now derived from human embryos but without the need for using embryos.”
And so, in the space of a few days, the White House that approved the sale of a morning-after pill that puts embryos at risk announced its opposition to a new scientific procedure that lets embryos survive. All in the name of protecting embryos.
John Aloysius Farrell’s column appears each Sunday in Perspective.
