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September 7, 2001

CHRISTIANS AND CLONES

By Ron Brackin
Special Correspondent for ASSIST News Service

LITTLE ELM, Texas (ANS) -- Christians & Clones by Ron Brackin

“No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success. Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.

A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.” Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley, 1818

Standing in place of God has made mankind a schizophrenic folk. We consider issues that are too wonderful for us, unable to arrive at a consensus and abandon firmly held convictions in the face of any new argument that seems reasonable.

Some of our thinkers define death, for example, as the cessation of respiration. Others maintain that death occurs when heart activity ceases. Still others insist that a person is alive until the brain dies. The controversy over when life begins runs a similarly erratic course.. Eleven U.S. states recognize unborn children as potential murder or accident victims from the moment of conception, while a dozen more require them to have reached a certain stage of development. Most others rule that the fetus has no rights until it is “born alive” (Dallas Morning News, 6/3/01). Unable to agree on the alpha and omega of life, we remarkably seem to have no fear of manipulating Creation.

In recent years, we’ve raced heedlessly past amniocentesis and in-vitro fertilization and are currently poised between embryonic stem-cell research and cloning, while scientists, politicians, and bio-industrialists press us to lower our heads and plunge even deeper into the moral abyss. We’ve come this far only because long ago, they fooled us. Evading the thorny question of when life begins, they redirected our attention to the plight of infertile married couples – estimated at 1 in 14 in the United States (Lori B. Andrews, Self, April 2000).

In response to the natural desire to conceive, these cultural architects proposed generating large numbers of live embryos ex-utero and implanting them a few at a time into the womb until one survives and begins to mature. The “surplus” live embryos then are “discarded” and available as a source of stem-cells. The rationale is that these cells might hold the secret of eradicating a panoply of diseases, disorders, and disabilities ranging from Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and diabetes to cancers, burns, and spinal injuries.

Because the egg and sperm are united outside the womb, many, like right-to-life advocate, Senator Orrin Hatch, maintain that the embryo is not human. “Microscopic embryos on a petri dish do not constitute life,” declared the Utah Republican (U.S. News & world Report, 7/23/01), “whereas an embryo in the womb does.” Former pro-life Senator Connie Mack, on the other hand, opts for a biological rather than geographical approach to nonpersonhood. “To call this an embryo is misleading,” he says. “It’s a blastocyst” (USNWR 7/2/01).

While dehumanizing semantics employed by nineteenth century slaveholders sufficed to justify slavery by merely redefining black Africans as chattel instead of people, redefining a developing child by calling it a “blastocyst” simply won’t do. Senator Mack errs scientifically, not to mention any moral, spiritual, or ethical objections to his assertion. According to the medical staff at the Infertility and IVF Center in St. Louis, “A blastocyst is an embryo that has developed for at least five days after fertilization and has divided into two different cell types. The surface cells, seen in the embryo, are called the trophectoderm and will eventually become the placenta. The inner cell mass will become the fetus.”

The controversial blastocyst is also the source of embryonic stem-cells that caused all the ruckus in the Oval Office and on Capitol Hill this summer. This complex issue was simplified recently by CBS News correspondent Gloria Borger. “Here’s the real choice,” she declared. It’s “between throwing away embryos or using their stem cells for medical research” (USNWR 7/2/01). Apparently a no-brainer. Her clarification, however, violates an elementary precept of logic. It is comparable to asking, “Do you still beat your wife?” – a bit of Socratic flummery that assumes an affirmative answer to the unasked question: “Do you beat your wife?” In Ms. Borger’s query, the unasked question would have been “Can one justly, morally, theologically, or ethically ‘throw away’ an embryo?” Bob and Susanne Gray would respond with a resounding “No!”

A Dallas Morning News report (2/25/01) refers to “12 fertilized embryos, the genetic offspring” of the Grays who, after Susanne became pregnant, offered their remaining preborn children for adoption. “A number of fertility programs,” the article notes, “are quietly offering couples the option of putting their excess embryos up for adoption – either openly, as the Grays have done, or anonymously.” How, then, does one “adopt” a blastocyst if it is not a human being in process of maturing? Meanwhile, media omniscient, Robert Bartley of The Wall Street Journal, settled yet another dicey dilemma concerning the use and/or abuse of embryos in stem-cell research. “In religious terms,” Mr. Bartley pronounced (USNWR 7/23/01), “the soul has not entered the body.”  It is a relief to have that age-old dilemma finally dealt with.

While the journalists, philosophers, ethicists, scientists, and merchants bandy about the issues, we as Christians – rather than muddle our heads with every wind of doctrine, vague suppositions, humanistic logic, and utilitarian justifications – do well to consult the only reliable authority, which is the Word of God. To do this, we need first to pause and drop back a stage or two, since Scripture does not address per se embryonic stem-cell experimentation and IVF, and revisit the question of the point at which a human being becomes a human being. Or is even that the right way to frame the debate?

Asking when a human being becomes a human being implies that an immortal spirit – the essence that separates us from the animal kingdom – is somehow injected into a bit of biological tissue when sperm meets egg or at a point in time between conception and viable delivery.

But what if life “began” only once – when “God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul,” the biblical account given in Genesis 2:7? The word translated as “breath” means “soul or spirit.” If the soul or spirit – whichever term you prefer to use to signify the eternal image of God in every human being – has never been demonstrated to reside exclusively in any single organ of the human body, might it not be pervasive throughout? In every cell? In every atom? If so, would that not include the woman’s egg and the man’s sperm? And if it would include these two vital components of a new being, perhaps life does not “begin” at any point in the reproductive process. It may simply and naturally “continue,” passed on along with its DNA instruction booklet, seamless and uninterrupted from Adam to the last blastocyst on earth.

This certainly agrees with Psalm 139: 13-16: “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” It also agrees with Jeremiah 1:4-5: “The word of the LORD came to me, saying, ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart . . .’ ” If this is so, a bright red flag should pop up when phrases like “spare” frozen embryos are introduced into the debates, implying that any human being, at any stage of his or her development, can be “excess” or “surplus.”

In his announcement to the nation that he would allow federal funds to be used for research on “60 lines of existing stem-cells,” President Bush observed that “the life-and-death decision has already been made.” Within these nine words lies the danger of the continuing debate. When world governments began legalizing, even promoting, abortion, life-and-death decisions were made. And notwithstanding the joyful testimonies of infertile couples who have conceived through one form or another of in vitro fertilization, the annual cost of these “tiny miracles” is the lives of thousands of preborn children, defined out of humanity by terms like “surplus” embryos, and then “discarded.”

While it may be praiseworthy that President Bush released federal funding for research only on already “discarded” embryos and that he continues to oppose the destruction of viable embryos, it is less laudable once an embryo is recognized to be a person. It is as though he had reasoned: “All right, these 60 people already have been murdered. It’s over. We can’t bring them back. I mourn their deaths. So we might as well try to get some value out of their corpses. We simply will not pay for any research on anyone else who is killed. Although it is perfectly legal, that kind of research must be paid for by private funds.”

In a commentary earlier this summer, my esteemed colleague, Jeremy Reynolds, compared embryonic stem-cell research to medical students learning their craft by working on cadavers. While I applauded the rest of his commentary, I was concerned by that particular analogy. One difficulty is that history warns that the early market for cadavers generated the likes of the infamous eighteenth century grave robbers Burke and Hare, “resurrectionists,” who, confronted by a growing demand and diminishing supply of bodies for medical schools, began to conk folks over the head to beef up production.

Consider also what science may discover in its stem-cell research. If embryonic stem-cells actually are found to conquer the wish list of diseases and conditions, what then? Again referring to the cadaver analogy, the demand for embryos would be insatiable, and scientist/merchants are already talking seriously of cloning “disposable” embryos to supply these cells. That same life-and-death decision to kill preborn children that began with abortion and carries us through IVF and embryonic stem-cell experimentation threatens to lead us finally to the “C-word.” According to MSNBC News correspondent Tom Curry (8/9/01), “

Advanced Cell Technology of Worcester, Massachusetts, is already preparing to produce the world’s first cloned human embryos, from which it will extract stem cells.” Nell Boyce of U.S. News & World Report announced that “the first serious scientific meeting devoted to human cloning” was held in Italy last March. Her report went on to say that scientists “Panos Zavos, who runs a fertility clinic in Lexington, Kentucky, and controversial Italian fertility doctor Severino Antinori, who helps post-menopausal women bear children, plan to clone a human within two years, and many scientists don’t doubt that they’ll succeed.”

Cloning has even spawned its own religion. The Raelians hold that cloning is the key to humanity’s future. In a special investigative report, Ms. Boyce writes that, “Despite warnings from scientists who say such practices are fraught with potential health risks, some Raelians have built a secret U.S. laboratory and vowed to create the first human clone this year. . . . Officials believe the lab was set up by Clonaid, a company billed, in 1997, as the world’s first human-cloning company. The firm was founded by Claude Vorilhon, a colorful French race-car driver and former journalist now known to his [tens of thousands of] followers as the prophet Rael. . . . Dozens of young Raelian women . . . have volunteered to donate eggs and act as surrogate mothers for a cloned embryo” (USNWR 7/9/01).

As with stem-cell research, cloning will be surrounded with its share of outrage, fear, self-righteousness, and faux humanitarianism. But it will continue nonetheless, because the life-and-death decision has already been made. It matters little or not at all, then, how many monsters are produced by genetic fiddling or how many human clones must die before one survives (Ian Wilmut of Scotland’s Roslin Institute failed 277 times before he got Dolly, the ewe that started it all in 1997). “The catalog of infirmities in cloned animals includes everything from grossly enlarged placentas and umbilical cords and fatty livers to hypertension and misshapen heads.” The cloned calf, Second Chance “had juvenile diabetes, anemia, and a skin infection. . . . Noah, the clone of an endangered oxlike guar . . . died after two days from dysentery, the result of an infection – and possibly a compromised immune system” (USNWR 3/19/01).

Nevertheless, the life-and-death decision was made years ago, reducing the intrinsic value of a human being to just so much bone, tissue, and plasma and a few bucks worth of chemicals. The real choice before mankind is not between throwing away embryos or using their stem cells for medical research. The real choice is whether humanity will continue to contradict God’s truth and stand by its self-destructive life-and-death decision . . . or whether it will turn back to God, honoring, protecting, and preserving every human life because of its innate sanctity of being created in his image and infused with his life. Choose the latter, and there is hope. Choose the former, and we will plunge headlong, in lemming fashion, into the sea of anarchy and chaos.

“Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror-stricken.” Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley, 1818.

Ron Brackin is a freelance writer in Little Elm, Texas.  (Pictured: Dan Wooding (left) and Ron Brackin (right) at the National Religious Broadcasters convention in Dallas, Feb. 2001).  (Pictured: Dan Wooding (left) and Ron Brackin (right) at the National Religious Broadcasters convention in Dallas, Feb. 2001).  He has more than a quarter of a century of experience ranging from journalist and congressional press secretary to marketing and public relations.  He is the author of several nonfiction and fiction books, including “Sweet Persecution” (Bethany House 1999) and is currently available for fulltime employment or freelance projects.  Full resume available upon request.  Contact him directly at ronbrackin1@msn.com, (972-294-2514 fax, 972-294-2513 office).

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