The Barefoot Mailmen

Readers interested in a thoughtful discussion of the President’s executive order dramatically expanding federal funding of embryo-destructive research should check the online conversation between Robert George and Douglas Kmiec hosted last month by U.S. News & World Report. 

Both George and Kmiec are well-known conservative Catholic intellectuals.   Kmiec, who served in the Reagan Administration, made headlines during the presidential campaign when he publicly endorsed Obama.  More provocatively, Kmiec argued that—despite Obama’s unblemished voting record in support of abortion and his promise to make passage of the Freedom of Choice Act a top priority—support for Obama was compatible with the pro-life teachings of the Catholic Church.  Kmiec further argued that an Obama presidency would, in the end, serve pro-life goals, as more generous social programs would reduce the demand for abortion and the unitive power of Obama’s persona would reduce the acrimony surrounding the issue. George, a professor at
Princeton and former member of President Bush’s commission on bioethics, writes widely on ESCR from a pro-life prospective.

George takes the (in my view, correct) position that Obama’s executive order effectively permits federal funding for human cloning, so long as the human clone, once created, is destroyed.   Kmiec is more sanguine, and generally supportive of Obama’s approach.  It is a fascinating series of exchanges and well worth your time.

Toward the end of their discussion, Kmiec posed questions to George and to U.S. News’s readers concerning the question of when life begins.  Kmiec’s questions and George’s answers were posted last week.  They too are well worth your time.   It will surprise no one that I think George gets the better of these exchanges, but I encourage everyone to read them to make up their own minds.

The challenging back-and-forth provided by Kmiec and George is in stark contrast to most rhetoric about ESCR, which tends to be masked in a fog of euphemism and inexact language.  One example of this is the tendency of supporters of ESCR to say “stem cell research” when they mean “embryonic stem cell research.”  The effect of this is (1) cloud the fact that there are other kinds of stem cell research which do not involve the destruction of human life, and (2) to give the impression that opponents of ESCR as extremist luddites opposed to all stem cell research. 

I came across another example of rhetorical fogginess recently, in a brief story on the reaction to Obama’s executive order from academics at the University of Virginia, which plans to expand its ESCR program.  The reporter quotes Margaret Foster Riley, a professor at UVA law school and a member of the University’s bioethics panel, who reassures the reader the University is going to avoid the more “contentious” aspects of such research:

“I do want to make it clear that we’re not likely to be involved in some of the more contentious areas, which would involve actually deriving the cell lines,” said Margaret Foster Riley, a UVa professor of law. “We will be using cell lines that have been derived by other institutions.”

The cell lines are derived from embryos, which is why this issue causes controversy. Foster Riley said she hopes the additional research will begin immediately.

So, UVA is not going to be deriving the cell lines — i.e., destroying human embryos to get at their stem cells. Rather, some other institution is going to destroy the embryos to harvest the stem cells . . . and then UVA is going to perform research on them.  I’m not sure how this arrangement makes what UVA is doing any more (or less) moral.  Substitute “human embryos” with “convicted felons” and you’ll see what I mean.  If UVA were doing experiments on tissue harvested from convicted felons, it would not improve matters to know that the felons were being dissected by someone not affiliated with the school.  The morality of  the destruction of embryos (or felons) for research purposes does not meaningfully depend on whether the destruction and the research are performed under the same roof.  The proper question is whether the embryos (or felons) have a right not to be destroyed and the limits of that right.

I may be making too much of this.  As it happens, Prof. Riley is a friend of mine, and someone whose essential decency and commitment to fairness I respect tremendously. I spent a year during law school as one of her assistants in the legal writing program, and I recruited her to write on the ethics of stem cell research for an academic journal I edited, and I found her to be admirably fair-minded despite our differences of opinion.  My intention is not to criticize her for a brief statement in a tiny local news story.   But I think that this is a small example of how the way in which experts discuss these issues, and the press reports them, often produces less clarity instead of more.