William L. Saunders, J.D.

My organization, the Family Research Council, has developed a statement we have called, “Building a Culture of Life – A Call to Respect Human Dignity in American Life.”  You can find a copy at our web page – www.frc.org.  The statement has been signed by many religious, social, cultural and political leaders.

Our recommendations  are partly political.  For instance, we recommended the passage by our Congress of the “Born Alive Infants Protection Act”.  Let me tell you about that Act; it will give you a sense of how far we in the United States have to go to build a culture of life. 

Sometimes a baby survives an abortion; it is expelled from the womb but is still alive.  Before the Born Alive Infants Protection Act was passed, it was perfectly legal to allow that baby to die, to throw it in a trash can, to drown it in a pan of water.  The Act now makes it a crime to fail to provide it the same medical attention that a normally-born baby would receive.  This is pathetically little progress – babies surviving abortions may not be killed - but it is a step in rolling back the abortion license in the USA, a “right” that is virtually unchecked. 

Likewise, our Culture of Life statement recommends passage of the “Partial Birth Abortion Act”.  You may not know what partial abortion is.  It is a type of abortion during which the abortionist partially delivers a living baby, and then punctures its skull and removes its brains.  A ban on such a procedure was passed twice during the administration of President Bill Clinton; however, each time, President Clinton vetoed it.  In the fall of 2003, Congress passed the bill again, and President Bush signed it into law.  The story, however, isn’t over.  Unfortunately, the Act is being challenged in American courts.  It is not certain the Act will be upheld by our courts.  But think about it – even if the courts uphold its constitutionality, that will mean that only one kind of abortion will be prohibited; each and every abortion can still take place, only a different procedure will be necessary.

So you can see that even if we pass the political measures we hope to, we have a long way to go.  Thus, we understand that it is important to change the hearts and minds of our citizens.  Though the political is important, we cannot rely on it alone.  We must also seek to change, to influence, the culture.  Thus, in our Culture of Life statement, we recommend many cultural actions.  In fact, we emphasize cultural action over political action.

One cultural action is “education”.  Not simply education as it taught in schools, but educating citizens on issues through any means of communication available.  While many of us understand how terrible abortion is, and we fight it,  we often fail to recognize other threats to life.  One area in which people desperately need education is in bioethics and biotechnology.

Bioethics is a field of ethics whose subject is biotechnology.  What is biotechnology?  It is the application of science and scientific engineering to human beings.  Where might this relatively new science of biotechnology be heading in the future, where might it be taking we human beings?

Let me tell you about Professor Lee Silver.  He is a biologist at Princeton University.  In his book, Remaking Eden – How Genetic Engineering and Cloning Will Transform the American Family, Professor Silver exuberantly describes the “future” that biotechnology has in store for us.  The future lies in a new field, “reprogenetics.”  Reprogenetics results from the union of reproductive technologies, particularly in vitro fertilization (IVF), and advances in gene therapy.  Through reprogenetics, Silver believes humanity will eventually separate into two classes or kinds of people, the “genrich” or genetically enhanced class, and the “naturals”.  Silver also believes there is no (bio)technological reason we will not one day have “fetal parents” (i.e., germ or sex cells taken from fetuses, combined and implanted in a host-mother), “human chimeras” (formed from the merger of two embryos), and male pregnancy (either by insertion of an artificial womb or by attaching the embryo inside the abdomen).

    In addition to Silver’s predictions, which he insists are straight forward applications of our current data base, I want to mention another field of biotechnology – cybernetics.  Cybernetics is the merging of man and machine.  On one level, this is very common and not threatening.  Anyone who wears a hearing aid or glasses is a “cyborg”.  However, cybernetics is proceeding far beyond the familiar.  Consider the following - in one experiment, paralyzed human patients received brain implants into which their neural cells grew, enabling them to communicate by using their minds to control a cursor on a computer screen - a true merger of man and machine.

Another field of biotechnology is nanotechnology.  Nano means microscopic, literally, engineering on a molecular scale.  Thus, we might one day have nanorobots which can clean the cholesterol out of blocked arteries.  But we might also have nano-plaugues, microscopic “robots” multiplying out of control, able to penetrate even cell membranes, and thus posing a risk against which it is difficult to conceive a defense.  This is not science fiction; research is advancing rapidly in this area.

If we can repair and replace every part, even microscopic parts of the body, do we really need a human body after all?  It may surprise you, but this question is being seriously considered.  “Trans-humanism” or “post-humanism” is a theory that posits that the human body was useful for the first stage of human evolution.  But bodies will soon be replaced by a more efficient, longer-lasting machine.  Humans are destined for a  post-body  existence. 

Male pregnancy, fetal parenthood, human chimeras, genetic engineering, cloning, two genetically-differentiated kinds of human beings, cybernetics, nanotechnology, perhaps nano-epidemics, even a post-body human existence – how do we decide whether any of these should be pursued?  How do we decide if science and biotechnology should be permitted (by we citizens, under the laws our representatives pass) to proceed to do every thing that can be done?  Some scientists argue that they should be allowed to do whatever they can.  Professor Lee Silver, in fact, says there are no ethical reasons to fail to do any of the things I have mentioned.  Is he right?

I submit he is clearly wrong.  And, further, that anyone who knows the history of the 20^th Century should immediately recognize he is wrong.  After World War II, the allies held the famous Nuremberg Trials.  Those trials resulted in the issuance of the Nuremberg Code.  The Nuremberg Code set forth principles to be followed in all human experimentation.  As we all know, the Nazi doctors had undertaken gruesome experiments with prisoners.  The Nuremberg Code was intended, in fact, merely to set forth as a code those ethical principles that the civilized world already agreed to.

Now, how do those principles apply to the issue of human cloning, which Professor David Prentice has just discussed so lucidly?  First, one must decide what the subject under consideration is.  As Professor Prentice has so clearly demonstrated, that subject is a human being.  Human cloning for whatever purpose undertaken creates a human being.  It may not look like a human being to us, but that is only because we have forgotten how each of us looked in the first two months of our lives.  For that is what an embryo is – it is only one stage of human development.  In this stage, we look like a raspberry!  But we are still a human being.  We are so at our first moment of creation, and remain so until we die, whether that death occurs at 20 years, 20 months or 20 days. 

The next question to ask, once we know the subject is a human being,  is how may that human being be treated?  Since so-called therapeutic cloning involves the creation of a human being whose life is taken when embryonic stem cells are removed, such “research” is prohibited by the Nuremberg Code, which prohibits any research likely to result in the death of the human subject.   Though the science of many of these issues is complicated, the ethics is not.  Regardless of the benefits that might result, if the experiment violates the principles of the Nuremberg Code, it is unethical and should not be pursued.  In short, the end does not justify the means.

As Ambassador Chevarri of Costa Rica just old us, the issue of cloning has been considered for the past two years at the UN.  A special committee is considering whether to recommend to the General Assembly that a treaty be prepared which would ban cloning.  Unfortunately some of the confusion about what cloning really is has entered this debate.  Hence, some nations favor banning only what is called “reproductive cloning”; a better term for this would be “live-birth cloning,” for, as we have seen, all cloning, no matter what the motive was for undertaking cloning in the first place, is reproductive – by definition, it produces another member of the human species. 

Other nations at the UN favor a total ban on cloning.  I am proud to say the United States has supported that position.  However, Latin Americans should be proud that the leader of the effort to totally ban cloning has been Costa Rica.

Last fall, it appeared the UN would vote to prepare a treaty banning all human cloning.  However, at the last minute, some pro-cloning nations, joined by some anti-US nations, joined to block the vote, and by a procedural ruse delay action on whether to prepare a treaty for two years.

However, I am happy to report to you some good news – in December, due to intense negotiations at the UN, through the leadership of Costa Rica, it was decided the issue would be addressed this year, in the fall of 2004.

That presents you delegates to the World Congress of Families with a wonderful opportunity.  You can influence what will happen.  If there was one thing I learned while serving as a US delegate to the UN Special Session on Children in 2001/02, it is this – the future of the pro-life and pro-family cause will be decided by Latin America.  The reason is that at the UN, nations are divided into voting blocks.  Unfortunately, on many family and life issues, Latin American delegations to the UN have not been reflecting the views of the people in their countries.  For instance, there is no region of the world that is more pro-life than is Latin American.  Yet Latin American nations often vote the wrong way.  I am sad to report to you that the action against cloning last year the UN fell one vote short – and Mexico voted the wrong way!

So here’s your opportunity, and your responsibility – lobby your governments hard, make sure they support the proposal to ban all forms of human cloning.  If Latin America will unite against human cloning, there will be enough votes at the UN to ban it.  That is a great task for you, to convince your governments to send delegations to the UN in the fall which will support Costa Rica and a total ban.  It is a great task, but you are up to it.

To build a culture of life, we must undertake a two-pronged project – we must change hearts and we must change laws.  In Latin America, your culture is pro-life, while in America it is not.  Yet, perhaps because you have not educated one another about the threats to life posed by the new biotechnologies, your laws do not sufficiently protect the earliest life.  (A bill is pending now before the Mexican Senate that would do that – tell your senators to pass it!)  Further your international representatives have not represented you well.  Insist that they pass international laws that protect life.