Ron Reagan, in his
recent speech before the Democratic National Convention described the
process of therapeutic cloning. He said that “no fetuses are created,
none destroyed” during this process. His comments in context:
…imagine going to a doctor who, instead of prescribing drugs, takes
a few skin cells from your arm. The nucleus of one of your cells is
placed into a donor egg whose own nucleus has been removed. A hit of
chemical or electrical stimulation will encourage your cell's
nucleus to begin dividing, creating new cells which will then be
placed into a tissue culture. Those cells will generate embryonic
stem cells containing only your DNA, thereby eliminating the risk of
tissue rejection.…
By
the way, no fetal tissue is involved in this process. No fetuses
are created, none destroyed. This all happens in the laboratory at
the cellular level.
However, a
government resource describes therapeutic cloning this way:
Therapeutic Cloning
Therapeutic cloning, also called “embryo cloning,” is the production
of human embryos for use in research. The goal of this process is
not to create cloned human beings, but rather to harvest stem cells
that can be used to study human development and to treat disease.
Stem cells are important to biomedical researchers because they can
be used to generate virtually any type of specialized cell in the
human body. Stem cells are extracted from the egg after it has
divided for 5 days. The egg at this stage of development is called a
blastocyst. The extraction process destroys the embryo, which
raises a variety of ethical concerns.
If the government
admits the embryo is destroyed, how can Reagan claim “no fetuses are
created, none destroyed”? The issue seems to involve the point at
which the fertilized egg “becomes human.” Here is an excerpt from our
The Facts on Abortion that deals with this issue:
What does modern science conclude about when human life begins?
Many people mistakenly feel that abortion is a “religious” issue. But
it is not. It is a scientific issue and, specifically, a biological
issue. The scientific authorities on when life begins are biologists.
But these are often the last people consulted in seeking an answer to
the question. What modern science has concluded is crystal clear:
Human life begins at conception. This is a matter of scientific
fact, not philosophy, speculation, opinion, conjecture, or theory.
Today, the evidence that human life begins at conception is a fact so
well documented that no intellectually honest and informed scientist
or physician can deny it.
In 1973, the Supreme Court concluded in its Roe v. Wade
decision that it did not have to decide the “difficult question” of
when life begins. Why? In essence, they said, “It is impossible to say
when human life begins.”
The Court misled the public then, and others continue to mislead the
public today.
Anyone familiar with recent Supreme Court history knows that two years
before Roe V. Wade, in October 1971, a group of 220
distinguished physicians, scientists, and professors submitted an
amicus curiae brief (advice to a court on some legal matter) to
the Supreme Court. They showed the Court how modern science had
already established that human life is a continuum and that the unborn
child from the moment of conception on is a person and must be
considered a person, like its mother.
The brief set as its task “to show how clearly and conclusively
modern science—embryology, fetology, genetics, perinatology, all of
biology—establishes the humanity of the unborn child.”
For example, “In its seventh week, [the pre-born child] bears the
familiar external features and all the internal organs of the
adult.... The brain in configuration is already like the adult brain
and sends out impulses that coordinate the function of other organs….
The heart beats sturdily. The stomach produces digestive juices. The
liver manufactures blood cells and the kidneys begin to function by
extracting uric acid from the child’s blood.... The muscles of the
arms and body can already be set in motion. After the eighth week…
everything is already present that will be found in the full term
baby.”
This brief proved beyond any doubt scientifically that human life
begins at conception and that “the unborn is a person within the
meaning of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.”
In fact, prior to Roe v. Wade, nearly every medical and
biological textbook assumed or taught that human life begins at
conception. That human life begins at conception was an accepted
medical fact, but not necessarily a discussed medical fact. This is
why many textbooks did not devote a discussion to this issue. But many
others did. For example, Mr. Patrick A. Trueman helped prepare a 1975
brief before the Illinois Supreme Court on the unborn child. He noted,
We introduced an affidavit from a professor of medicine detailing 19
textbooks on the subject of embryology used in medical schools today
which universally agreed that human life begins at conception… those
textbooks agree that is when human life begins. The court didn’t
strike that down—the court couldn’t strike that down because there
was a logical/biological basis for that law.
Thus, even though the Supreme Court had been properly informed as to
the scientific evidence, they still chose to argue that the evidence
was insufficient to show the pre-born child was fully human. In
essence, their decision merely reflected social engineering and
opinion, not scientific fact. Even during the growing abortion debate
in 1970, the editors of the scientific journal California Medicine
noted the “curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which
everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and is
continuous whether intra- or extra-uterine until death.”
Even 25 years after the abortion revolution that politicized
scientific opinion, medical texts today still often assume or affirm
that human life begins at conception. For example, Keith L. Moore is
professor and chairman of the Department of Anatomy at the University
of Toronto Faculty of Medicine. His text, The Developing Human:
Clinically Oriented Embryology, is widely used in core courses in
medical embryology. This text asserts:
The processes by which a child develops from a single cell are
miraculous.
Human development is a continuous process that begins when an ovum
from a female is fertilized by a sperm from a male.
Growth and differentiation transform the zygote, a single cell...
into a multicellular adult human being.
The reference to the “miraculous processes in a purely secular text is
not surprising. Even a single strand of DNA from a human cell contains
information equivalent to a library of 1,000 volumes. The complexity
of the zygote itself according to Dr. Hymie Gordon, chief geneticist
at the Mayo Clinic, “is so great that it is beyond our comprehension.”
In a short nine months’ time, one fertilized ovum grows into
6,000 million cells that become a living, breathing person.
Further, medical dictionaries and encyclopedias all affirm that the
embryo is human. Among many we could cite are Dorland’s Illustrated
Medical Dictionary, Tuber’s Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary,
and the Encyclopedia and Dictionary of Medicine, Nursing and Allied
Health, which defines the embryo as “the human young from the time
of fertilization of the ovum until the beginning of the third month.”
In 1981, the United States Congress conducted hearings to answer the
question, “When does human life begin?” A group of internationally
known scientists appeared before a Senate judiciary subcommittee.
The U.S. Congress was told by Harvard University Medical School’s
Professor Micheline Matthews-Roth, “In biology and in medicine, it is
an accepted fact that the life of any individual organism reproducing
by sexual reproduction begins at conception....”
Dr. Watson A. Bowes, Jr., of the University of Colorado Medical
School, testified that “the beginning of a single human life is from a
biological point of view a simple and straightforward matter—the
beginning is conception. This straightforward biological fact should
not be distorted to serve sociological, political or economic goals.”
Dr. Alfred Bongiovanni of the University of Pennsylvania Medical
School noted: “The standard medical texts have long taught that human
life begins at conception.”
He added: “I am no
more prepared to say that these early stages represent an incomplete
human being than I would be to say that the child prior to the
dramatic effects of puberty... is not a human being. This is human
life at every stage albeit
incomplete until late adolescence.”
Dr. McCarthy De Mere, who is a practicing physician as well as a law
professor at the University of Tennessee, testified: “The exact moment
of the beginning [of] personhood and of the human body is at the
moment of conception.”
World-famous geneticist Dr. Jerome Lejeune, professor of fundamental
genetics at the University of Descarte, Paris, France, declared, “each
individual has a very unique beginning, the moment of its conception.”
Dr. Lejeune also emphasized: “The human nature of the human being from
conception to old age is not a metaphysical contention, it is plain
experimental evidence.”
The chairman of the Department of Medical Genetics at the Mayo Clinic,
Professor Hymie Gordon, testified, “By all the criteria of modern
molecular biology, life is present from the moment of conception.”
He further emphasized: “now we can say, unequivocally, that the
question of when life begins… is an established scientific fact…. It
is an established fact that all life, including human life, begins at
the moment of conception.”
At that time the
U.S. Senate proposed Senate Bill 158, called the “Human Life Bill.”
These hearings, which lasted eight days, involving 57 witnesses, were
conducted by Senator John East. This Senate report concluded:
Physicians, biologists, and other scientists agree that conception
marks the beginning of the life of a human being—a being that is alive
and is a member of the human species. There is overwhelming agreement
on this point in countless medical, biological, and scientific
writings.
In 1981, only a single scientist disagreed with the majority’s
conclusion, and he did so on philosophical rather than scientific
grounds. In fact, abortion advocates, although invited to do so,
failed to produce even one expert witness who would specifically
testify that life begins at any other point than conception.
Many other biologists and scientists agree that life begins at
conception. All agree that there is no point of time or interval of
time between conception and birth when the unborn is anything but
human.
Professor Roth of Harvard University Medical School has emphasized,
“It is incorrect to say that the biological data cannot be decisive….
It is scientifically correct to say that an individual human life
begins at conception, when the egg and sperm join to form the zygote,
and that this developing human always is a member of our species in
all stages of its life.”
In conclusion, we agree with pioneer medical researcher, Landrum B.
Shettles, M.D., Ph.D., that, “There is one fact that no one can
deny; human beings begin at conception.”
Again, let us stress that this is not a matter of religion,
it is solely a matter of science. Scientists of
every religious view and no religious view—agnostic, Jewish, Buddhist,
atheist, Christian, Hindu, etc.—all agree that life begins at
conception. This explains why, for example, the International Code of
Medical Ethics asserts: “A doctor must always bear in mind the
importance of preserving human life from the time of conception until
death.”
This is also why the Declaration of Geneva holds physicians to the
following: “I will maintain the utmost respect for human life from the
time of conception; even under threat, I will not use my medical
knowledge contrary to the laws of humanity.”
These statements can be found in the World Medical Association
Bulletin for April 1949 (vol.1, p. 22) and January 1950 (vol. 2,
p. 5). In 1970, the World Medical Association again reaffirmed the
Declaration of Geneva.
What difference does
it make that human life begins at conception? The difference is this:
If human life begins at conception, then the process of harvesting
stem cells, like abortion, is the killing of a human life.
To deny this fact is scientifically impossible.
