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By Rick DelVecchio
Catholic News Service
SAN FRANCISCO (CNS) — Market-driven medical technology applied at
the beginning and end of life is a growing threat to human dignity, speakers
for the National Catholic Bioethics Center told a conference in San Francisco
earlier this month.
Catholics must counter with an uncompromising defense of Christian ethics
that also encourages lawful innovation to nurture and sustain life, the
speakers said, adding that Catholic teaching provides the most reasonable
framework for decisions about human life in any clinical or research setting.
“I always encourage people that if you’re ever confronted
with a teaching of the Church you don’t understand and that at first
looks problematic, stop and ask yourself what dimension of human dignity
the Church sees being threatened in this procedure that we won’t
allow,” said John Haas, president of the bioethics center.
The Philadelphia-based center is a scholarly institution that advises
the Vatican and the nation’s bishops.
Oakland Bishop Allen H. Vigneron said, in an interview, that the main
issues on which the Church finds itself “at odds with a lot of the
trends in our culture” were in-vitro fertilization, embryonic stem-cell
research and end-of-life issues.
Attracting 200 Catholic educators and health-care workers from throughout
the Bay Area, the conference took place in the city that hosts California’s
$3 billion stem-cell research institute.
Dr. Vincent Fortanasce, a neurologist and medical ethicist, expressed
alarm about research involving human embryonic stem cells and cloning.
He said ethical concerns are being overshadowed by the potential economic
benefits from the patenting of new technologies that involve creation,
manipulation and destruction of embryos.
Twelve other states are following California’s lead in supporting
cloning and embryonic stem-cell research, Fortanasce said, arguing that
the trend is driven by economics.
“Scientists are no longer pure scientists,” he said. “What
they are is entrepreneurs.”
Stem cells hold great promise because they can potentially cure chronic
diseases by differentiating into the cells of any damaged organ. But Fortanasce
said no one has been cured by a product of human embryonic stem-cell research
and speculated that the research is a bridge to human cloning.
“Not only are we in charge of life,” he said, “but we’re
the creators.”
Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk, the bioethics center’s education director,
said advocates for embryonic stem cells maintain that 100 million people
could benefit in the United States alone. The claim is overstated, he
said.
“There’s a good deal of overselling, overbilling, overpromising
and outright hyping that is occurring and has been occurring for so long
that it is conditioning all of us whether we realize it or not,”
he said. “We need to distinguish the truthful claims from the incredible
hype that is going on all around us.”
Father Pacholczyk said it is a myth that Catholic teaching warns against
stem-cell research. The Church opposes research involving human embryonic
stem cells but is not against using stem cells from adults, from umbilical
cord blood and other sources.
“Of the different forms of stem-cell research, the Church could
support nine out of 10 under the right circumstances,” Father Pacholczyk
said.
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