The Double Standard of Opposing Embryonic Stem Cell Research

But [embryonic stem cell] research is controversial because days-old embryos must be destroyed to obtain the cells. They typically are culled from fertility-clinic leftovers otherwise destined to be thrown away. – Indianapolis Star, “Obama to reverse limits on stem cell research funds,” March 7, 2009, p. A6

Christians and other pro-life advocates have opposed stem cell research on the grounds that embryos have to be destroyed in order to cull the stem cells, as this article makes clear. What I hadn't realized is where these stem cells come from – fertility clinics. If we are honest with ourselves, we should see that we are applying a double standard: either we should accept embryonic stem cell research or we should oppose the forms of fertility treatment that produce these embryos.

Some fertility treatments entail fertilizing ova, yielding embryos outside the would-be mother’s body. Some of these embryos are then implanted in the mother’s womb, some are frozen and some are discarded. What is the difference between destroying these embryos to cull stem cells and destroying them just because they aren't needed anymore? Ethically, it would seem that destroying leftover embryos for a purpose – to harvest stem cells – is better than destroying them because they are no longer needed or wanted.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not arguing for culling stem cells from embryos. What I’m arguing is that destroying embryos for any reason is wrong in God’s eyes. In other words, Christians should oppose this kind of fertility treatment as well as harvesting stem cells from embryos. But that doesn't seem to be the case. Christians don’t seem to want to go that far. Why? Because infertility is painful, and how can we refuse this option to Christian couples who are unable to conceive otherwise?

We get to the argument of my previous post: compromise in these painful situations is quite compelling. In this case, however, the reasoning for taking advantage of this fertility treatment is not a question of responsibility as it would be in the case of a man unable to provide for his family by refusing life-restoring stem cell therapy. This is simply a case of wanting what we want at any cost, even if it means the destruction of one’s own embryos to get it. That sounds pretty crass.

Yes, the pain Hanna felt (1 Samuel 1) is with couples today. It seems callous of me or anyone else to suggest they forego this fertility treatment in order to experience having children like most people do. But isn’t it just as callous to do so at the expense of perhaps a dozen would be children that we bring into being for the express purpose of having only one of them actually be born without regard for the rest of them. We want what we want when we want it and will do whatever is necessary to achieve our wants regardless of the cost to these children.

The question comes down to this: are these embryos life or not? If they are, we should reject stem cell harvesting and fertility treatments that destroy embryos regardless of what that means we will have to do without. If they are not life, then Christians and pro-lifers should not oppose embryonic stem cell research. To do so would be to live by a double standard.

There are even more basic questions here: Are we willing to live within God’s righteous limitations regardless of what that costs us? What are those limits? Does He offer alternative provisions for these problems which we are not willing to seek and wait for, let alone recognize because they are too hard to come by or not what we want? More on these questions later...

The Ethical Dilemma of Fetal Stem Cell Therapy - Compelled to Compromise

“Mice with spinal cord injuries regained much of their ability to walk normally after getting injections of stem cells taken from the brains of human fetuses … The work strengthens recent evidence that various kinds of stem cells – including some from human embryos and others from fetuses – have the capacity to nurse injured nerve cells back to health and in some cases even become replacement neurons themselves. … [The stem cells] are the progeny of human cells retrieved from the brains of 16- and 18-week aborted fetuses.” – The Indianapolis Star, September 20, 2005, p. A3.

This article said that several companies were hoping to test this therapy in humans since it has been so successful in lab mice. What happens if the stem cells from aborted fetuses or even embryos are proven to restore function to humans with various kinds of nerve damage, whether from diseases such as Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, or spinal cord injuries? Should Christians be willing to receive this therapy? Most Christians I know oppose this research.

Let me pose the following scenario: a Christian man has an injury which paralyzes him. He is no longer able to provide for his family as a result. Let’s say this therapy has been proven effective in humans and has been approved by the FDA. Should this man receive stem cells harvested from an aborted fetus? Refusing this treatment is no longer a hypothetical situation for this man and his family. Even his friends are likely to encourage him to receive the treatment. Suddenly, it is no longer so easy for us to refuse him access to this treatment purely on ethical grounds, nor for him to refuse it. In fact, it seems rather irresponsible to refuse this treatment. Principles can easily fall by the wayside when the stakes are so high.

I was quite surprised, when I posed this scenario to some dear Christian friends, to hear them say they saw no problem with such treatment. They posed the following counter-scenario, one which actually happened in our city not long before our conversation. Some kids egged a man’s truck as he drove by. Angered, he went back to confront them. One of the kids pulled out a gun, shot and killed him. His organs were harvested for use by people on various organ donor lists. His organs saved or greatly improved the quality of life of a number of individuals. My friends said there is absolutely no difference between the scenario I posed and this one, except that abortion is legal and murder is not. If anything, the latter scenario should be less acceptable to us than the former.

These friends are definitely pro-life. They do not in any way support abortion. Yet, they raise a good point, and their reasoning has enabled them to not even think twice about accepting stem cell therapy, should the need arise. What is the ethical difference? The fetus is not aborted for the purpose of harvesting stem cells any more than the man was murdered for the purpose of harvesting organs. As much as we hate murder and abortion, why should that stop us from taking advantage of these therapies?

Let me put another twist on it: if this therapy using fetal stem cells works, will it make the battle to reverse Roe v. Wade all the more difficult? Will it possibly weaken the will of those who oppose abortions – even Christians – making us more willing to look the other way? Most likely it will. If nothing else, this thinking should make us willing to do the irresponsible thing – be willing to refuse to be restored to wholeness by the death of a fetus.

I think you can imagine that if this therapy proves out, it will only take a generation or two before Christians concede that this therapy is acceptable. In fact, I think that all it will take is one member of our church to be in a position to benefit from this therapy and most all of the church will lay aside any qualms. To do otherwise would seem to be extremely callous. For this family to do without this therapy also might entail the whole local Body of Christ coming together to help the family go without, which is something almost unheard of in churches, at least for the long haul. But even if we could help provide for the family, asking that man, or especially a child, to forego a normal life still seems heartless. There is almost no way the church will be able to hold to its principles in the face of such a choice.

This begs the following question: what else has there been to which the church has objected on such ethical grounds or grounds of faith which we now consider acceptable without blushing or questioning or even being aware that there was ever any concern at all? I won’t go into it here, but there have been many objections of Christians through history – rightly or wrongly – which have been forgotten. Qualms have been allayed, and we have gone the way of the world without even being aware there ever was a concern at all. This king of reasoning and success has been far too compelling for Christianity to hold out against it.

Let me close with a portion of a script from an episode of Star Trek Voyager called “Phage” which originally aired February 6, 1995, prior to the stem cell debate coming to a head. A member of an alien race has harvested the lungs of one of Voyager’s crew members to replace his own. The crew member is on artificial life support, when Voyager finally captures the alien and the person to whom he gave the harvested lungs. It is interesting to note that the writers of this episode seem to indicate that there must be limits on therapies, that one must be willing to die rather than to cross certain ethical bounds. It’s rather refreshing to see someone in popular culture suggest such ethical limits.

JANEWAY: You’re on the Starship Voyager. I’m Captain Kathryn Janeway of the United Federation of Planets.

DERETH: I am Dereth … of the Vidiian Sodality.

JANEWAY: You attacked one of our crew members and you lured us into this asteroid. Why?

DERETH: We are gathering replacement organs and suitable biomatter. It is the only way we have to fight the phage.

JANEWAY: A virus? Some kind of disease?

MOTURA: Yes. It attacked our people over two millennia ago. It consumes our bodies, destroys our genetic codes and cellular structures.

JANEWAY: So you harvest the bodies of other beings to replace your own tissues as they’re consumed by this … phage?

MOTURA: Our immunotechnology cannot keep up. The phage adapts. It resists all attempts to destroy it. Our society has been ravaged. Thousands die each day. There is no other way for us to survive.

JANEWAY: I have a great … sympathy for what your race has endured. But I cannot allow you to keep the organs you removed from one of our crew members. We need them back immediately.

DERETH: I’m afraid that isn’t possible. I have already biochemically altered the air-breathing organs and grafted them into Motura’s body. They are a part of him now.

MOTURA: He is my honatta. His task is to find the organs I need for survival. We … we try to extract them from the dead …

DERETH: But sometimes, when the need is immediate, more aggressive actions are required.

JANEWAY: So now I am left with the same choice you made – whether to commit murder to save a life, or to allow my own crewman to die while you breathe air through his lungs.

MOTURA: It must be impossible for you to understand how any civilized people could come to … this. Before the phage began, we were known as educators and explorers – a people whose greatest achievements were artistic. I, myself, am a sculptor of note on my world. All I can say is that when your entire existence is at stake …

DERETH: You don’t have to explain yourself , Motura.

MOTURA: If the consequence of this act is a death sentence, so be it. At least it will put an end to my suffering.

JANEWAY: I can’t begin to understand what your people have gone through. They may have found a way to ignore the moral implications of what you’re doing, but I have no such luxury. I don’t have the freedom to kill you to save another. My culture finds that to be a reprehensible and entirely unacceptable act. If we were closer to home, I would lock you up and turn you over to my authorities for trial, but I don’t even have that ability here, and I am not prepared to carry you forever in our brig. So I see no other alternative … but to let you go.

My reply to Immo

My reply to Immo’s comments on Is there such a thing as “secular medicine”? – Part 3 became so long that I decided to make it a less formal post than my others. So here’s my reply to Immo.


Immo: Thanks for your thoughtful comments. I hope you'll read more of my posts, in particular Chronic Disease: Two Worldviews posted in March, 2006 and the comments posted there. This issue is very complicated, and I interacted briefly with one thoughtful brother there which I won’t repeat here.

I want to first comment on the Christian contribution to sanitation. Can you give me a reference to the observation of Jewish midwives contributing to improved sanitation. I have excerpts from a book written in 1860 by J.P. (Ignaz P.) Semmelweis who studied childbed fever, finally determining statistically that hand washing made the difference – that’s really abbreviating all he went through to get to his conclusion. In the portion of this book that I have and all the googling I've done on it so far, there is no mention of any Jewish influence – nor any Christian influence for that matter. (I’m still looking for a complete copy to verify this.) He did note that midwives washed their hands, but their faith wasn’t noted, whether Jewish, Christian, atheist, etc., or that their faith had any clear bearing on their practice. I'm reading a book right now that makes the assertion that Christian theology hindered the development of the current germ theory and sanitation measures because of theology.

In Matthew 15:1-3, Jesus defended the practice of the disciples of not washing their hands when they “ate bread.” The practice was simply a tradition of the leaders of Israel and not law. If hand washing was important, why did Jesus not urge His disciples to do so, not for tradition’s sake but for health’s sake? That doesn’t mean they never washed their hands before eating, but it would indicate that it wasn’t considered important to Jesus. Add that if hand washing was so very important for health, why was it not mentioned in the OT law? Yet, the value seems to have been proven today. Has something changed, and if so, what?

All the required washing was ceremonial ablution only some of which might be considered health related. For example, a woman has certain cleansing to perform after menstruation. The focus seems to be solely ceremonial, as with the emission of semen by a man. Washing was to take place after each emission. We don’t recognize any health-related value to these today. But after relieving oneself, far from the camp and burying it, there is no mention of any washing at all required, ceremonial or otherwise. These washings seem to be strictly ceremonial.

Here's one recurring problem: without a doubt, people who professed to be Christians or Jews have made significant contributions to science. In reality, until the last 200 years or so, that was almost everyone in the West – at least nominally. Yet, I'm coming up empty on any substantive or material contribution of Judaism or Christianity to these scientific theories. They didn’t draw something out of their theology or religion to form their theories. All these Christians and Jews got the content of the ideas and theories from pagan and occult practices, worldviews and thinking. For example, the Pythagorean belief that number was reality, even more so than the world we can directly observe, led to the current mathematical modeling of the world in physics and other sciences. The Pythagoreans worshipped number and were a secretive, sacrificial cult. The motivation for Copernicus and Kepler to place the sun at the center of the solar system came from neo-Platonism which had a kind of sun cult, the sun becoming associated with Jesus for Christian neo-Platonists.

What I’d love to find are examples of purely-Christian thought, rather than pagan thinking with a possible Christian veneer, that led to modern scientific discoveries. Even two Christians who wrote the Soul of Science with the thesis that only Christianity could have fostered modern science because of its view of reality failed to provide even one example of it. They did state that they believed Kepler was driven by his Christian worldview to resolve a discrepancy in his understanding of the orbit of Mars with the data, but they provide no support or argument for it. They simply made the assertion.

So, if you can point me toward documentation of at least this one instance of a Jewish contribution, I'd appreciate it. Even then, however, will we be able to come up with it from the Scriptures or was it merely the tradition of men? I don’t think the Scriptures recommend the practice of washing hands when caring for a woman in childbirth or any kind of medical care. The Scriptures don’t forbid it nor do they recommend it – they are silent on the matter. So, even if it were a practice of Jewish midwives, it would be hard to show it came from the Lord.

The two toughest issues for me are Luke the physician and the lack of godly alternatives we seem to have. Luke, the “beloved iatros” (Colossians 4:14) – iatros is the Greek word for physician and also for healer – makes one wonder as you asked, what kind of physician and did he practice it after meeting Jesus? Or might it be “Luke the beloved healer” with the gift of healing. But one early-Christian writer refers to Luke as practicing medicine as a profession. That would seem to eliminate the “gift” of healing. I think he would have refused payment for God’s free gift. One thing is for certain, however, that it was not like today’s medicine and was probably Greek “secular” medicine – Hippocratic medicine. It was most likely not medicine associated directly with pagan cults, I would think. The Bible, however, is amazingly silent on the issue of “secular” medicine. That silence could be taken as tacit approval or a complete lack of need for it. Of course, the silence does not extend to pharmakeia – that, at least in some form, being completely condemned. But, in any case, Luke muddies the issue for me.

As for oil, I take it as simply applying oil. But I cannot see how to take it as a medicinal application, and we can’t see today how it could be of any real aid in the vast majority of cases. To say that it was understood to be medicinal raises a problem: the Scriptures (in James 5) would be promoting something as being of medicinal value which in reality is of no medicinal value at all in most cases. Thus, the Scriptures would not be reliable in this matter. Thus, I do not think the intent is medicinal. So it would have to be seen as being more symbolic – of the Holy Spirit? – or simply soothing to a person suffering. I really don’t know which way to go with that, yet. I just have trouble seeing it as the Scriptures supporting the medicine of the day, which today is believed to be largely false. See the comments attached to Chronic Disease: Two Worldviews for further comments on this.

The second problem I mentioned is still outstanding: if there is a problem with modern medicine in whole or just in part, what do we do with medical issues that modern medicine can easily handle when the Biblical recommendations fail? Let me put it this way. If a person you knew were paralyzed, and there was a fetal stem cell therapy which could restore the use of his legs and put him back to work earning a living for his family, would you recommend he stay paralyzed awaiting the Lord’s healing, or should he avail himself of the stem cells from an aborted fetus? It may seem like a different issue, but it’s not all that different. Perhaps another example would help, very current in Africa. If modern medicine fails, and Christians know a witch doctor who has success with that issue, is it okay for them to go to the witch doctor? This is a real issue for our brothers and sisters in Africa. Is healing the ultimate goal regardless of the modality or cost? The reality is that I know of no Christian, except for those we consider kooks, which refuse medical care on the basis of conscience. Those who do refuse, seem to have extreme views, people die, and they face charges when a minor under their care dies or suffers needlessly without the shunned treatment. I can understand their point of view, but they and I am at a loss to explain why strict adherence to the Scriptures fails to provide the hope of healing the Scriptures seem to raise for us. Recourse to pagan means seems the only option.

Let me ask: what would happen if there were a fetal stem cell therapy – a distinct possibility today – which could restore a paralyzed child’s use of his legs, in part or wholly, and the child’s parents refused the treatment because of the source of the stem cells – an aborted fetus? Would those parents then be charged with neglect? Actually, I doubt that even Christian parents would refuse the therapy, no matter where the stem cells came from. It’s so easy to reason, in this case, that the fetus has already been killed, they hadn’t killed it or ordered it killed, so why not benefit? Isn’t it just the same as harvesting organs from an adult murder victim. The issue is very complex, just from the standpoint of ethics, let alone any potential compromise with the teaching of Scripture because of pagan origins entering the equation.

James 5, Mark 16, the existence of the gift of healing and other passages, even in the OT, seem to raise the expectation of the Lord healing rather than relying on contemporary medicine – contemporary in whatever day. If that healing fails, do the Scriptures allow for or even encourage the use of whatever means to obtain healing? If not, where do we draw the line? Is that line drawn based on the severity of the ailment or the nature of the cure? That’s not an easy question to answer, if you think about it. If you say the severity of the ailment, then any cure will do if the ailment is serious enough or painful enough. If you say the nature of the cure, then a person should be willing to die, continue to suffer pain or remain paralyzed if no acceptable cure is available. All this is assuming, of course, that Biblical healing hasn’t “worked.” As one brother put it to me, “It just doesn’t work.” Some say it sometimes works, but modern medicine seems the most reliable and safest route. The better question, then, is why? The easy answer is that God doesn’t work that way anymore, but I don’t think the Scriptures support this. If it is His desire to work that way today, the answer to why He isn’t could be very disconcerting.

An interesting comment in regard to looking first to God for healing was made by some English Christians in the 16 th and 17 th centuries. They believed it impious to look to God in any matter until all natural means had been exhausted. In other words, God was a last resort. At first, this bothered me until I read a comment by one Christian who, when called to minister to people dying of some deadly disease like the plague, refused to go believing it a greater abomination to do so when all that was needed was to improve the sanitation in that part of town, and the people wouldn’t get sick in the first place. While he seems a bit cold hearted, the reasoning isn’t without merit. If a person is wasteful with his money and asks God to fix his woeful financial situation, we would rightly tell him to stop praying and start a budget.

On guilt by association: first, the pagan gods are no gods, they are demons (Psalm 106:37, 1 Corinthians 10:20). If they were just sacrificing to blocks of stone and nothing more, there would be no concern at all, but demons are involved in their lives. There is also the issue of “doctrines [teachings] of devils” which people adhere to (1 Timothy 4:1). Second, I agree that the mere similarity of things is of little consequence. What is of concern, however, is learning “doctrines of demons” from pagans and incorporating those ideas into our thinking and beliefs. That is syncretism, and that is my concern.

Enough thoughts for this post. Thanks for taking time to read and comment.
Rob