New Options in the Stem Cell Debate?

You may have heard rumblings about new options in the stem cell debate that could get us around the current impasse.

SLATE RECENTLY RAN AN ARTICLE ON TWO SUCH PROPOSALS.

I’m not convinced that either proposal works.

I’ll talk about the first, and simpler, proposal today and the second later.

Here’s Slate’s description of the first:

The first, by Drs. Donald Landry and Howard Zucker of Columbia
University, proposes that we take stem cells from embryos at the same
point at which we take organs from children and adults: right after
they die. All we have to do is agree on the point at which an embryo is
dead. Landry suggests that this point is "the irreversible arrest of
cell division," which conveniently applies to huge numbers of embryos
frozen in IVF clinics. With further study, he argues, we can clarify
the signs of irreversible arrest, which will tell us when it’s kosher
to start yanking stem cells. He cites an experiment in which stem cells
from arrested frog embryos were injected into normal frog embryos.
Twenty-five percent of the cells began to divide again and were
absorbed into the new embryos.

The conservatives on the council
like the idea. They have two concerns. They want to make sure the signs
chosen to certify embryo death don’t exclude some living embryos.
They’re also wary of the Columbia team’s suggestion that stem cells
could be harvested from embryos "in extremis," i.e., near death. But
Landry and Zucker point out that these are the same issues ethicists
have worked out in the case of a dying child or adult. We just need to
iron out the details. That’s the beauty of the proposal: It’s
conventional.

The idea of harvesting stem cells from deceased embryos is something that occurred to me before. While it would get around the fact that embryonic stem cell research is otherwise murder, the mere fact that we’re not dealing with murder any more does not mean that it is problem-free. Here are several concerns:

1. The first and biggest problem is that we don’t know when an embryo is dead. In the absence of heart or brain (neither of which has developed at the time researchers want to harvest stem cells), conventional tests for life don’t apply. The "irreversible cessation of cell division" proposal is not unobjectionable.
   • First, what counts as "irreversible" may be a technical matter that is not intrinsic to the question of life. Just as we can often now re-start the hearts of people who previously had technologically irreversible cessation of heart activity (and thus now no longer use merely the absence of a heartbeat as a test for life), research may make it possible to reverse cessation of cell division in embryos.
   • Second, and related to the former, cessation of cell division (reversible or not) may be one stage of dying for embryos, but not death itself, just as cessation of heartbeat is one stage of dying for adults, but not death itself.
   • Third, the most obvious (to me) point at which we could say that an embryo is dead is when cellular metabolism has stopped. But if you wait that long, the stem cells may not be of any use.
2. Supposing that there is a point at which the embryo can be established as dead and at which the stem cells could be usefully harvested, there are still other concerns. One is what should be done with all the embryos languishing in cryonic suspension in IVF facilities. One possibility is that they ought to be implanted and allowed to develop (though is is controversial among conservative Catholic moral theologians). Unfortunately, the vast numbers of these children make this a practical impossibility.
3. Supposing, then, that these children are not to be allowed to develop, what should happen to them? Baptizing them, unfreezing them (and baptizing them will itself unfreeze them), allowing them to die  naturally, and then respectfully dealing with their remains would seem to be the preferred way of addressing the situation.
4. Rather than proceding immediately to burial or cremation, though, would it be possible for parents to fill out the equivalent of an organ donor card for these children (a stem cell donor card)? We let parents do that with children are born and then die in the natural way.
5. In principle, perhaps it could be done. But I feel a moral discomfort with the idea of letting parents artificially create large numbers of children that they can’t possibly raise and then, upon their expiry, hand them over to researchers for experimentation on their corpses.
6. The root problem, of course, is the artificial creation of the children in the first place. That was immoral and unethical and should not have happened. But accepting it as something that cannot be undone, should parents be allowed to donate their children’s stem cells to bring some good out of their cruelly and immorally short lives–perhaps doing so to stop the outright murder of other children?
7. All I can say is . . . maybe. While the Church recognizes the moral legitimacy of organ donation in principle, it is not at all clear that it would be proper to allow parents who have artificially created children for themselves to exercise this possibility on behalf of these children.

It thus strikes me that the situation is far too ambiguous, and ultimately we’ll need guidance from the CDF on this one (which won’t offer such guidance until Catholic moralists have chewed this one over for a while).

In any event, it seems to me that this proposal is very far from being a slam dunk.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live." View all posts by Jimmy Akin