The Catholic Observer, Diocese of Springfield (MA), April 13, 2001, p. 23

SPRINGFIELD (MA)- You know the debate is complicated when the Vatican newspaper L’Osser-vatore Romano runs, in effect, a correction on a paramount moral issue.

Last December, an editorial in the Vatican newspaper praised one of the latest developments on the bio-genetic front: a technique that, according to some researchers, manages to transplant human cell nuclei in a cloning process without creating a human embryo.

The process, called somatic cell nuclear transfer, or SCNT, is important because it can be used to grow human stem cells, which many scientists believe are the key to healing a host of diseases.

High-profile lobbying by those affected by injuries and diseases like Hollywood actors Christopher Reeves and Michael J. Fox, led the U.S. Congress last year to resume funding for fetal stem cell research.

The church objected, since such research involves the death of human fetuses.

The church encourages, as an alternative, adult stem-cell research, which does not necessarily pose ethical problems and which has seen recent published successes.

But many researchers believe that that process, in which genetic material is safely removed from adults or from a newborn’s umbilical cord to produce stem cells, holds less promise for the successful treatment of human disease.

L’Osservatore Romano originally editorialized that SCNT was an "extremely positive element" of modern science.

But immediately, high-ranking bishops and Vatican experts began disputing the no-embryo claim of SCNT, saying there was no guarantee that this type of cloning would not produce a developing human life.

Nearly a week later, the Vatican newspaper ran a 3,000-word article on the issue, written by the top two officials of the Pontifical Academy for Life. Their ethical verdict on SCNT: It’s too soon to say.

"The moral judgment on whether or not such research is licit... remains suspended because of a lack of identification of the material, or physical object, of the action,’’ said the article.

In other words, a very basic question remains unanswered about the product of SCNT: "Is this human life?"

Vatican officials said that as long as doubt exists, there remains a moral obligation to refrain from experimenting with this type of process.

At the same time, they did not exclude the possibility that SCNT could be shown to work without creating an embryo, even a "single-cell" embryo. But they said the burden of proof was on researchers to demonstrate this to the scientific community - without, meanwhile, using human cell transfers to prove their case.

Protection of fetuses

In 1968, when the landmark encyclical "Humanae Vitae" restated the church’s condemnation of abortion, it seemed clear to nearly all Catholics - even those who dissented from the encyclical’s teaching on artificial contraception - that the fetus was indeed a nascent human being. That is the position that has been held from the time of early church councils.

If fetal death was the only issue involved in stem-cell research, the debate about its morality would fall along familiar "pro-life" and "pro-choice" lines between those who consider the destruction of pre-born life as murder and those who consider the pre-born less fully human.

But the cloning aspect of stem-cell experimentation broadens, and complicates, the ethical debate.

What is human life?

"All people of good will who are concerned about what it means to be a human person in the world should take this seriously," said Father John Tuohey, a moral theologian and ethicist for the Providence Health System in Oregon.

Aside from the destruction of the fetus, the process of human cloning has, up to this point, resulted in many failed attempts. That could mean the destruction of more, at least potential, human life.

But as the recent debate over cloning and stem cells illustrates, defining what is human life is becoming more difficult for church experts today.

When Jose Cibelli, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts, revealed in November 1998 that he had fused some of his own cells with material from cow eggs whose nucleus had been removed in a 1996 experiment on the Amherst campus, a reporter for The Catholic Observer sought comment from Boston Cardinal Bernard Law.

Cardinal Law, then the chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities, declined immediate comment, citing the need to further examine the issue.

Church officials have since had plenty to say about scientific procedures that can produce stem cells, the genetic material of the human body; and cloning, the process that can, at least theoretically, produce a genetic duplicate of an individual without biological reproduction.

Application difficult

Even though recently reiterated church teaching is clear, and consistent with long-established moral principles, the application of that teaching to an array of scientific situations is not always easy.

Father Tuohey, a Springfield diocesan priest, told the Observer that determining when the use of stem cells is moral, and when it is immoral, can be very complicated. "When directed toward therapeutic uses, adult stem cell use wouldn’t seem to be a problem," he said.

Proponents of using stem cells from aborted fetuses contend that even if one objects to abortion, it is senseless to object to the use of cells which will never be born anyway.

But Catholic ethicists are extremely skeptical of that argument.

Even if a person believes that fetal stem cell use will not result in an increased number of abortions, "We don’t want people to think of fetuses as a resource (for stem cells)," said Father Tuohey. "It would be harder to argue against abortion if we become dependent on those stem cells."

In a seven-page statement released last August, the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life reiterated church teaching that a living embryo is not "a simple accumulation of cells," but rather a human subject with rights.

"As a ‘human individual,’ it has a right to its own life; and, therefore, any intervention which is not for the good of that embryo is a detrimental act to that right," the statement said.

The process of removing the stem cells "seriously and irreparably damages the human embryo, cutting its development short," the statement said, making it "a seriously immoral act, and therefore, gravely prohibited."

Those who believe in embryonic stem-cell research projects sometimes call the process "therapeutic cloning," since it is aimed only at harvesting stem cells to cure human disease, rather than "reproductive cloning" that would create copies of human beings.

To the church, there is no moral distinction when a human embryo is involved. That is why Bishop Elio Sgreccia, vice president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, told Vatican Radio last August that the efforts in the United States to use extra embryos produced in fertility treatments rather than from abortions were "a hypocrisy."

"When frozen embryos are collected (for stem cells), they are destroyed by these researchers. They, too are human embryos," he said.

But the question remains: Are the entities existing in all stem cell research procedures, morally speaking, human embryos?

The answer is actually more complicated than the expression, "life begins at conception" would suggest, say Catholic theologians.

When he announced the results of his experiment to The New York Times, Cibelli said the entity he created from parts of a cow egg and cells from his mouth was not a human embryo. He said his genetic material was "not a separate individual, just a de-differentiated cell from a patient."

Half -human?

Local pro-lifers, one wearing a "cow-man" suit, later picketed the offices of Advanced Cell Technology, the Worcester biotechnology firm formed by Cibelli when he left UMass, claiming that the research scientist had created a kind of half-human being.

The church has never directly defined the moral nature of his research.

But what about the biological products of completely human genetic material?

"Donum Vitae," the 1987 instruction by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said that "unconditional respect" is due to the human being "from the moment the zygote has formed."

To emphasize the point, one Vatican official, Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, has lately spoken about Jesus’ incarnation as beginning with the stages of embryo and even zygote, when the nuclei of egg and sperm cells fuse.

But the church has not actually defined when a human individual comes into existence.

Salesian Father Norman Ford, an Australian expert on health ethics writing in December in the London Catholic weekly The Tablet, said: "Is the early human embryo a person? The question is still not resolved."

Bishops’ statement

The U.S. bishops’ Committee on Science and Human Values, which convened a dialogue between top research scientists and church officials in 1998, said to U.S. bishops, in a report last year, that it opposed SCNT research because it is a form of cloning that violates, "respect for the moral and ontological status of the embryo."

But in a carefully worded statement, the bishops said that somatic cell nuclear transfer of an adult or fetal stem cell forms "a clone of the adult or fetus that possesses all the properties of an embryo created according to the order of nature."

Father Ford believes it is difficult to claim that the first two or four cells formed by a zygote constitute an "organized human individual." He tends to accept the 14-day period of embryonic development as the starting point for individual identity — though in practice he gives the "benefit of the doubt" to the young embryo, as church teaching now requires.

Redemptorist Father Brian V. Johnstone, a moral theologian at Rome’s Alfonsiana University who has closely followed the stem-cell debate, told Catholic News Service early this year that theologians may be taking a wrong path when they peg their arguments on such detailed scientific data.

"If we’re asking whether we have any certainty of the point at which we can say a human individual is present, as far as I can see, we don’t know," he said.

"The next question is: What is the significance of not knowing?" he said.

Father Johnstone contended that, from an ethical point of view, it is less important to define the precise moment when a human individual comes into existence and more important to consider the implications and consequences of destroying any embryo.

"If you destroy it, or experiment on it in a way that it is destroyed, one thing that’s very certain is that there’s going to be no future for this embryo, whether it was at that stage a human being or not. If it wasn’t, it certainly never will become one," he said.

Father Johnstone acknowledged that, unlike the fetus, the status of the embryo — including those of one or few cells — is the subject of doubt in the minds of many, including ordinary Cath-olics. This uncertainty can create problems in accepting the church’s teachings, he said.

Uncertainty not new

But he pointed out that the church has lived with this type of uncertainty before. For centuries, he said, it was generally accepted that "ensoulment" of the human being did not occur until after 40 or more days of fetal development. Despite that margin, however, the church did not teach that destroying an early-stage embryo was acceptable, he said.

The church today does not take an official position on when the human soul is present.

Father Johnstone said basic human intuition about life issues tends to support the church’s view that embryos deserve the benefit of the doubt about their right to life.

Because "scientific developments tend to run ahead of theological developments," theologians today sometimes scramble to keep up with modern technology, said Father Tuohey.

But he added that the theological grounding is there for many of the issues that the church is facing today.

"Newer arguments are being developed, we just need to get better engaged in them." Father Tuohey cites examples of the church allowing its teaching to evolve as its theologians better understand the nature of scientific developments.

In 1829, Pope Leo XII said that "whoever allows himself to be vaccinated ceases to be a child of God."

"Smallpox is a judgement of God, the vaccination is a challenge toward heaven," the pope said, arguing that vaccination was an inappropriate interference with the will of God.

"Obviously we vaccinate today," said Tuohey. "What we have learned from science can and must be brought to bear on our theology."

Another example, Father Tuohey added, was the 1950 encyclical by Pope Pius XII, "Humani Generis" ("On Human Origins"). While recognizing certain forms of the scientific theory of evolution, the pope said that humanity should not get so caught up in the novelty of scientific thought that they act without sufficient moral forethought.

Cloning

Pope Pius’ warning seems apt in the case of human cloning, when a full human being might be formed through the duplication of genetic material from a single adult, or another embryo.

Father Tuohey says cloned individuals would be fully human. "If you’re here, we’re glad to see you," Father Tuohey said, referring to a human clone arriving in the world some day. "They would still be due human respect."

He also said that human cloning, if realized, "can’t devalue humans."

"But it might undermine our respect for humans," he added.

Some human cloning advocates believe that the current stem cell debate may eventually become moot since cloning will lead to a much lower incidence of disease. They contend that cloning will allow humans to eliminate genetic diseases, at least among cloned humans, since a clone would be "generated" from the DNA of just one person.

Theoretically, choosing a person who is free of genetic "flaws" as the source for the clone would ensure that the new life would be free of genetic defects.

But the church condemns cloning for many reasons.

In 1997, shortly after Dr. Ian Wilmut of the Roslin Institute in Scotland announced the birth of Dolly, a cloned sheep, the Pontifical Academy for Life issued a detailed condemnation of human cloning, saying the technique would violate a number of ethical norms and turn the human being into an "industrial product."

Human cloning would exploit women, bring suffering to the cloned person and lead humanity further down the road to eugenics, or selective breeding, said the statement.

The six-page statement, which has subsequently been supplemented by several comments from church officials around the world, noted that the initial outcry after the birth of Dolly focused on worst-case and rather far-fetched cloning scenarios. It warned, however, that sentiment exists for accepting human cloning in some circumstances and urged strong action to make sure that does not happen.

On March 28, at a White House briefing, Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said President Bush will "work with Congress" on legislation that would ban the cloning of human beings in the Unites States. Many states have banned human cloning and federal funding for human cloning experiments is prohibited.

The Pontifical Academy’s warning has become clearer in recent months, as cloning advocates have begun to use the infertility or grief of parents to promote the procedure.

Panayiotis M. Zavos, professor of reproductive physiology at the University of Kentucky, and Dr. Severino Antinori, director of a Rome-based artificial insemination clinic, announced at a Jan. 25 press conference, that they planned, within two years, to clone human beings for couples who have not been able to bear children.

Antinori made international news in 1994 when he helped a 62-year-old Italian woman who had gone through menopause to have a baby. Zavos, who works in the animal sciences department of the university’s College of Agriculture, also is president of ZDL Inc., a private corporation dedicated to research into "enhanced conception possibilities," according to its Web site.

Clonings planned

The two scientists said the cloning efforts would take place in an undisclosed foreign country.

"Cloning has already been developed in animals. The genie is out of the bottle," Zavos said at the press conference. "It’s a matter of time when humans will apply it to themselves, and we think this is best initiated by us... with ethical guidelines and quality standards."

Another cloning effort, Clonaid, was founded by a man who goes only by the name of Rael. Rael also founded the Raelians, a religious cult in Montreal that believes that life on earth was created by extraterrestrial scientists.

Clonaid’s Web site is soliciting genetic material from dead children so they can reproduce them for their grieving parents.

"This is awful if it does work," said Richard Doerflinger, associate director for policy development in the U.S. bishops’ Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities, in a Jan. 31 interview with Catholic News Service.

"And it’s worse that it will often fail and lead to the destruction of a great deal of innocent life," he added.

Noting that the cloning of the sheep Dolly took 277 attempts, Doerflinger said many scientists believe that "the failure rate for human beings might be much higher."

"It might take thousands of tries" before a human being could be successfully cloned, leading to the deaths of thousands of unborn children, he added.

"But even if the cloning of a human being were successful on the first try, this is not a worthy way to produce a human being," Doerflinger said. "It’s reducing procreation to lab science.

"No act of love produces these children," he added, noting that the cloned child would, in reality, have no parents but instead be "a twin" of the person from whom he or she is cloned. Father Tuohey also has concerns about "manufacturing" humans.

"Donum Vitae" said children have a right to come into the world the way nature intended them to," said Father Tuohey. They have a right to a normal gestation period and to have two parents there for them when they are born.

"It’s wrong to institutionalize that," he said.

The Pontifical Academy agreed in its 1997 report, which listed several other ethical objections to human cloning. (See box on this page.) The article repeated the church’s condemnation of all in-vitro fertilization, including that involved in cloning, because it violates the church’s teaching about responsible sexual procreation.

The statement underlined that the popular perception of human cloning — that a perfect double of the person cloned would be created — is misplaced. The spiritual soul, created by God and the essential source of personality, cannot be cloned, it said. Neither can psychological development, which depends largely on experiences.

The statement said that, while human cloning should be condemned, cloning practices in vegetable or animal life can be beneficial, as long as respect for animals and individual species is maintained.

"There has to be a balance between stopping human suffering and the welfare of nature as a whole," said Father Tuohey.

Scientific concerns

Aside from the moral considerations, there are also scientific concerns associated with stem cell research and cloning, Father Tuohey added.

Many of the arguments against human genetic technology go beyond theological reasoning, he noted. "Natural law arguments are there, a person doesn’t have to be a believer to be against these things."

"Chaos and risk-taking is the way the world is," Father Tuohey commented, noting that chance is inherent in nature and has always been fundamental to our existence.

The priest pointed out that chaos is what is responsible for the uncertainty of nature, and how some people develop certain traits while others do not. It is what leads to the fact that every human being is unique.

Father Tuohey said that cloning eliminates any guesswork, with the cloner knowing exactly, at least genetically, what kind of a person he or she will get.

"Cloning takes away that fundamental aspect of creation. By taking a person’s genetic information and creating a clone, you’ve eliminated all of the chance that is part of your normal creation, your normal human development.

"The world works because there is chance and risk-taking. Cloning eliminates that." Speaking not only of humanity but all of creation, Father Tuohey said, "God doesn’t conquer chaos, he works it in."

Even the brave new world of human genetic engineering has some positive moral aspects, Father Tuohey said. "There is some good here, and it challenges our understanding of our role in the world, our understanding of what it means to be in God’s image."

Theologians cannot claim to have all the answers to the increasingly difficult questions being posed to them by modern technology, nor can they even claim to have complete answers to some of the older questions.