August 7, 2006VOL. 44, NO. 14Oakland, CA

Why the Church is opposed to
embryonic stem cell research

By Gerald D. Coleman, S.S.

On July 18, by a vote of 63 to 37, the U.S. Senate approved legislation that would expand federal support of medical research using embryonic stem cells. This legislation also promoted efforts to obtain stem cells from non-embryonic sources, and prohibited soliciting or receiving tissue from pregnancies initiated simply to provide material for research.

This legislation permitted research only on stem cells derived from human embryos that would be discarded, e.g., in the process of in vitro fertilization. President Bush vetoed this legislation the same week it was passed.
Bush’s decision was variously portrayed as a position against treatment of disease, as standing in the way of progress, and as bowing to pressure from religious extremists.

Judgments about embryonic stem cell research have raged now for about seven years, with intractable positions being taken, with little hope for resolution.
How are faithful Catholics to navigate this rapidly changing scientific and legislative landscape? (See “Making Decisions about Embryonic Stem Cell Research” by M. Therese Lysaught, in “Making Health Care Decisions: A Catholic Guide,” Liguori Press, 2006.) Are Catholics “religious extremists” when they disapprove of embryonic stem cell research?

What should we know?

What is a stem cell? Stem cells form in the earliest stages of human development after a fertilized egg begins to divide. After 7 or 8 divisions, the blastocyst is formed, a sphere made up of an outer layer which will become the placenta, and the remaining cells cluster to one side of the blastocyst.

These cells are all the same as they have not yet started to “differentiate,” or become the different tissues that make up the human body. These “undifferentiated” cells are human embryonic cells.

Because these cells can develop into any type of tissue in the human body, it is argued that human embryonic cells have the potential to provide scientific and medical benefits, e.g., use for transplantation purposes to replace damaged tissue for diseases like Parkinson’s, juvenile diabetes, spinal cord injury.

In the Senate legislation, stem cells would be obtained from embryos created in the process of in vitro fertilization.

The process entails the removal of the nucleus of an embryo (enucleated), which automatically destroys the embryo. Then a cell, e.g., a skin cell, is taken from the body of an adult patient. The nucleus of this skin cell is also removed, and then transferred into the enucleated ovum. The ovum is stimulated with an electric charge, chemicals, and hormones, and the materials from the two different cells fuse.

This ovum now has a full complement of genes and it begins to act like it has been fertilized. This embryo is then used as a source of stem cells that would be the exact genetic match to the patient who donated the skin cell.

Why is the Catholic Church (and others) against this type of biomedical research?
In accord with sound scientific knowledge, the Church holds that a human life is present from the time when conception is complete (fertilization). At conception, a new human life comes into existence with its own unique DNA. If unhampered, this fertilized ovum will grow into a full human being.

An embryo is not a “potential” human life. It is a human being. To deliberately destroy this embryo amounts to taking a new human life.

These moral factors are important in understanding this complex issue:
• Embryos are human life. A blastocyst is not simply human tissue or a cluster of cells.

• Blastocysts and embryos are living subjects with a right to life whose dignity is to be respected from fertilization to death.

• At conception, a unique individual is created, one with a unique genetic endowment that organizes and guides the expression of both its shared human dignity and its own individual character.

The Catholic Church has long been in the forefront of the human obligation to heal and care for the sick. The Church has long supported and promoted scientific research for the benefit of humanity.

For these reasons, the Church is not opposed, and in fact encourages, further research on adult stem cells found in all tissues in the human body, e.g., in the liver, brain, bone marrow. These stem cells can be cultivated and used for therapeutic purposes

Adult stem cells have been used therapeutically for over 40 years. What was once termed a “bone marrow transplant” is now referred to as a “stem cell transplant” because the therapeutic agent in the transplant consists in stem cells in the bone marrow.

This type of therapeutic potential of adult stem cells has also been demonstrated in the treatment of such diseases as diabetes, advanced kidney cancer and heart disease. Time magazine’s overview of this subject

in its July 24 issue is thus of great import, “…Adult stem cells may be more elastic than scientists thought, and could offer shortcuts to treatment that embryonic cells can’t match.”

(Sulpician Father Gerald D. Coleman is a lecturer in moral theology at Santa Clara University.)

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