Following Up the Veto

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - August 11, 2006

Sometime those in the pro-life movement wish that they could go back in time and re-fight some of the key battles in the history of the culture war. They long to go back before the time of Roe v. Wade and have another shot to awaken the good but quiescent majority to recognize what abortion will do to children, to mothers, and to the nation and get involved. They hunger to return to the era before the manufacturing of children in test tubes, to move the somnolent moral multitudes to action before that pandora's box was opened.

These thought-experiments, particularly common among the hordes of young pro-lifers seeking to understand why and how such monstrosities could have ever been permitted, are not altogether futile, because past failures give clues on how to prevent future ones. One inescapable lesson is that just as it is much easier to form someone's mind properly the first time than to change it, so it is much more effective to prevent bad policy than to rescind it after it has been legislatively or judicially enacted.

That is why President Bush's July 19th veto of a bill to provide federal funding for embryonic stem cell research was so important. Even though private funding for the killing of human embryos to harvest their stem cells is legal and a few states, like California, are funding it from state tax revenue, federal funding would have given this evil type of research far greater momentum and sanction — and once begun, it may never be possible to put the evil genie back in the bottle again.

Moreover, as some pro-life scholars are positing, the funding of destructive embryo research may actually be a greater offense against human life and dignity than even legal abortion. That's the argument of Dr. Richard Stith, a professor at Valparaiso University School of Law. In the September issue of the National Catholic Bioethics Center's Ethics and Medics, he makes the provocative case that financing embryonic stem cell destruction for research purposes would cross two lines that have not been transgressed in the practice of abortion.

The first concerns the dehumanization of the tiny developing human being. Dr. Stith notes that many who choose abortion do so out of panic and despair, with a profound sense of regret over what they're doing, almost because they think they have no choice but to have an abortion. They terminate the life of an "unwanted child," which paradoxically reaffirms the very parent-child relationship and obligation that it betrays: if the child were to live, parents would feel a duty to care for him or her, and so, in order to escape this duty, the child must perish. Even abortion doctors are only "contingently against life," Dr. Stith says, because they would not be performing abortions unless their clients were asking and paying for it.

Destroying human embryos for research purposes, on the other hand, is "wholly dehumanizing. When parents turn the living human embryos they have begotten over to science, they not only forget them as children but also turn them into commodities, donating them for eventual body parts. The embryos become wholly instrumental, they become resources to be calculated and consumed. They are degraded before they are destroyed. Like human embryos created by cloning, they do not die as unwanted children, or even as human beings, but as things to be used and used up. No greater negation of human dignity is possible."

The second border embryonic stem cell research crosses would be based on the public consequences of that dehumanization. There is a reason why most abortion supporters shudder at being called "pro-abortion" instead of "pro-choice": think abortion is evil, although a necessary evil. For them, legalizing abortion is not the same thing as desiring abortion. By contrast, Stith asserts, "no one in favor of funding embryonic stem cell research can say 'I'm not for killing embryos. I'm just pro-choice.' Such legislators want human embryos to be dissected. Stems cells must be extracted. In states like California and New Jersey, where embryonic stem cell extraction is funded by the public, the law can no longer be labeled even euphemistically 'pro-choice.'"

"Even where abortion is publicly funded," he continues, "the government does not insist on death. No officials are angry if funds previously allocated to subsidize abortion are left unused because women have freely chosen life. The abortion-related equivalent of embryonic stem cell funding would involve using taxes to pay women to abort their children, as part of scientific experiments aimed at distant and uncertain cures."

None of Stith's argument is meant to minimize the evil of abortion. Rather, it is to highlight by analogy how nefarious are the principle and practice of the destruction of human embryos for research purposes.

President Bush, against many of the members of his own party, almost all Democrats on Capitol Hill, and various public opinion polls, used his first veto to do what was not popular but right. In his speech announcing the veto, he stated, "If this bill were to become law, American taxpayers for the first time in our history would be compelled to fund the deliberate destruction of human embryos. Crossing this line would be a grave mistake and would needlessly encourage a conflict between science and ethics that can only do damage to both and harm our Nation as a whole. … If we are to find the right ways to advance ethical medical research, we must also be willing when necessary to reject the wrong ways. For that reason, I must veto this bill."

President Bush recognized the evil and acted. Now is the time for the rest of us to do the same. Otherwise young people in future generations may look back upon our time and deem that we let them down, by being too involved with less important matters not to do everything we could to prevent irreparable harm to the moral soil of our nation.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.