I’m afraid the Voice editorial of Oct. 13 on The President’s Council on Bioethics gets a few facts wrong. First, I can assure you that the debate during the past three years has been vigorous, quite real and often very tense. There is a wide variety of perspectives represented in the Council. Its pluralistic composition can be seen in the fact that it has not issued unanimous recommendations on any of the critical issues.
I also think it is inaccurate to accuse the Council of “being motivated solely by Judeo-Christian concerns.” There are certainly Jews and Christians in the Council, but it should be noted that unlike the Clinton NBAC, this Council deliberately rejected the idea of inviting religious testimony on any of the issues. All of the justifying arguments that went into the final reports are strictly rational and accessible to people of any faith. For Dr. Leon Kass, former chair of the council, this was a key concern.
The 10-vote majority recommendation of a four-year moratorium on embryonic stem cell research was never implemented and did not effectively bring discovery in the field to a halt. Research with private funding has continued. It should be noted that the use of public funding for research that entails embryo destruction has been banned in the U.S. since Congress passed the Dickey Amendment in 1996.
Finally, the claim that the destruction of a 14-day-old embryo (not “zygote”) constitutes termination of nascent human life is surely not based on Christian theology. Its sources have nothing to say about embryology. The claim is based on two premises: (1) that we are essentially organisms, bodily living beings, and not minds that somehow come later into the body, and (2) that a human organism, like that of any mammalian animal, starts when the chromosomes of the gametes fuse after fertilization and constitute a zygote. The former is a philosophical claim, the latter is a statement of scientific fact if there ever was one.
I am delighted that Dr. Pellegrino will now assume leadership of the Council, but I sincerely doubt that his task should be to “turn it around.”
Alfonso G?mez-Lobo
Georgetown Professor of Philosopy and PCBE member
