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| The Ethical Dilemma Confronting Stem Cell Research |
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Jane Maienschein, Regents Professor and Director at the Centre for Biology and Society at Arizona State University explains in her book Whose View of Life? (2004) that the conflict between science and religion, between saving the life of an individual and the right of existence of an embryo, is a false dichotomy. She states, "neither science nor religious morality alone have the answers…we need open public discussion and richer shared understanding of what is involved in defining and refining life."
The current debate is over these two opposing views. Identifying a way forward given the lack of common ground between them has proven a challenge for politicians and legal experts at both the national and international level.
Failures of Public Policy
To date the UN has been unable to pass a treaty on human cloning. In November 2004, UN diplomats shelved a planned vote on banning the cloning of human embryos. A motion put forward by Costa Rica and backed strongly by the US calling for a treaty to ban all cloning as unethical and morally reproachable was abandoned due to a deadlock over therapeutic cloning. An alternative motion drawn up by Belgium suggested that a decision to ban therapeutic cloning should be left to individual countries, but endorsed a worldwide ban on reproductive cloning (reproductive cloning is the creation of human life from stem cells).
The international community is so split that a broadly worded declaration is now being talked of instead of a treaty governing the use of stem cells. Belgian diplomat Marc Pecsteen said, "There is such division in the international community that any treaty would not make it, so the idea of the declaration is to find some general language that we could all live with."
Stem cell policy has become a sensitive and controversial topic of debate across Europe and the US. International organisations over the last three years have consistently struggled in drawing together a framework governing stem cell research. The European Union remains unable to reach a decision on funding and as a public policy debate it came to the very fore in the recent American presidential race.
In August 2001 President Bush decided that federal funds could only be used on stem cell lines already created; in effect a ban. George Bush's chief adviser on medical ethics and the chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, Leon Kass, was quoted as saying, "A woman's body should not be a laboratory for research or a factory for spare body parts". A recent report by the President's Council on Bioethics stated that scientific freedom is not an overwhelming legal right. John Kerry in contrast backed therapeutic cloning throughout the Presidential election race and in June 2004 announced plans to allow federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.
The situation is such in the US that Congress is considering legislation that would criminalise stem cell research and punish researchers with ten year jail terms and $1 million fines. Scientists citing unparalleled government interference in "scientific and academic enquiry" argue that as in the case of dangerous chemicals and atomic energy, greater and clearer regulation is required instead of a ban (Walters, 2003).
The prospects of a ban in the US is driving stem cell research into the private sector where there is no such regulation; an environment which fuels concerns over the impact of research into reproductive cloning. Stephen Pincock writing in the Lancet (2004) quotes an American scientist as saying, "In America, with government support you can't make (human embryonic stem cell) lines, you can't do therapeutic cloning - don't even think about doing therapeutic cloning." In the private sector, however, "You can do pretty much what you want - you can buy gametes and make embryos, you can make cell lines, you can do both therapeutic and reproductive cloning."
How Islam Negotiates the Ethical Quagmire
The current debate on stem cell research demonstrates the shortcomings in a liberal secular framework negotiating a way forward. Whilst President Bush explained his decision to withdraw federal funding for therapeutic cloning by saying, "I have made this decision with great care, and I pray it is the right one", Professor Maienschein (2004) aptly expresses the unease of the opposition; "In a country founded on separation of church and state, it is not clear why it is prayer that should guide an American president to policy decisions about bioscience."
The extent to which views on ethics and morality should influence public policy is contested heavily. But such disputes say nothing of the challenge that confronts scientists, politicians and thinkers in agreeing on a set of ethics in the first instance or to identify a source for them; reaching a consensus appears an insurmountable task. A secular framework may regard beliefs on the humanity of the embryo or foetus as matters of personal faith which are respected as personal choices in a pluralistic society and given no precedent over any other. But relegating them from decisions of political or public policy leaves a void in answering questions on ethics, morality and indeed life. Because, of its own, a secular framework has no inherent standard that can provide guidance in a debate that is in need of an understanding of human life. As a result, the myriad of personal beliefs on human life and ethics have themselves come to occupy a pivotal role in the debate.
But due to the lack of an inherent standard, a secular framework also lacks the ability to arbitrate between these opinions in order to decide which to utilise and which to ignore, other than to hope for an elusive consensus. Margaret Brazier, Professor of Law at Manchester University, in her book 'Medicine, Patients and the Law' (1992) describes the difficulty for the law to respond to such a "divergence of moral opinion" and states that a "consensus is impossible to attain". She states, "When does it (the embryo) acquire the same right to protection as you and I enjoy? Is it at fertilisation…? Or is it at some later stage in embryonic development? This might be at fourteen days, when the primitive streak forms, or when brain activity…is discernible at eight to ten weeks. Or is it much, much later, indeed after birth?" She continues, "A liberal democracy should respect divergent moral views. But that is anathema to 'pro-life' groups…The embryos true nature is unproveable. I happen to believe that the embryo is very probably of the same moral value as myself. I cannot prove that belief. But then nor can those who maintain that humanity is just another animal species prove their contention."
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