The urgent task of the moment is not the stance of the pro-life community vis-a-vis President Bush, nor any judgment, hostile or friendly, of his statesmanship or capacity. The crisis is among ourselves. Can we, the pro-life community, remember, cling to and coherently present our principles and our arguments, or will we lapse into somnambulism?
Catholic Exchange columnist Dr. Alan Keyes argued that this was the question in his column of last week. Some have mischaracterized him as attacking the President in that piece. He neither did so, nor had any such intention. As the first reactions to the speech and policy came in, Dr. Keyes and I both foresaw a split in the pro-life community. The days passed, and now we see that split.
Consider the public statement of one of the founders of the pro-life movement in America, Paul Weyrich. Mr. Weyrich needs no praise from us; he is an elder and a leader, and one whom we have admired for years. His accomplishments are legion, much too numerous to recount here. In addressing the ESCR issue, Weyrich goes over some distinctions taken from professional philosophers, and applies them in the following climactic image:
Suppose that among the ordinary cutthroats of London in 1540 there was a very eccentric one, who had a yearning for improved medical science, and who therefore went around stabbing his enemies precisely in order to provide corpses for medical students. In the morning the students find one of these corpses. Now, if they pick it up, are they formally collaborating with the murderer? The correct answer is still no, because intentions come in parts. According to noted moral theologian and Christendom College professor William Marshner, “The remote end is one part; the proximate end is another; and the means are a third. You do not become a formal cooperator with someone simply by sharing his remote end, or his ultimate purpose … wanting to advance medical science or wanting to have a corpse to dissect is only sharing a more or less remote end of the eccentric cutthroat. So long as the medical students do not will his means — the forcible termination of an innocent human life — they do not share his guilt.
Weyrich concludes:
For this reason, I am not surprised that the top moral experts in the pro-life universe – men like Professor Germain Grisez and Profession William E. May – have concluded that Bush’s moral line between what should and should not be funded is “ethically defensible.”
The imagined time-travel to 1540 is misleading, and deeply so. Let us try to restate it to make it more comparable to the tale of our times.
It is still 1540, and still London. Corpses still serve anatomists. But the eccentric cutthroat is the medical student, and he appears before the Crown the next day to receive his portion of silver, “Royal funding,” for his dissections and scientific advances. He is both the murderer, and the medicine man. Perhaps, to make the tale more perfect, he has the best techniques of murder in his day … best, that is, for producing an effective, a productive, a scientifically promising corpse. Indeed, his inky nighttime disguise cast away, on the day when he appears, clean and fresh in his doublet and lace, in the Court, that is just the case he makes to the benevolent monarch. “My corpses have the most promise, sire.”
On the cover of last week’s Time Magazine is a picture of both men, the eccentrically motivated killer and the innocent medical researcher. But don’t puzzle yourself if you only see one face — the face of a certain Dr. Thomson, whom Time calls “the man who brought you stem cells.” For in the case of embryonic stem cell research, the division between killer and healer is a change of a single man’s coats. And a third garb makes him the merchant. Time tells us that Thomson — “One of America’s best in science and medicine” — charges $5000 per pair of vials of the stem cells he has produced by killing human embryos.
What then are we to say of Weyrich's argument that, “So long as the medical students do not will the eccentric cutthroat’s means, the forcible termination of an innocent human life, they do not share his guilt”? But they are one man, the medical student and the killer, and the community in which we find him is one community, engaged cooperatively in the harvesting of research materials by killing embryonic human persons. Within such a community of shared practices and purposes, both of which it is willing to defend, it is clearly nonsensical to speak of the “medical student” persona scrupulously maintaining his innocence and his ignorance of the means used by the “cutthroat” persona. And it is with precisely one half of this supposedly schizophrenic, but actually quite well integrated, personality that the federal government is supposed to cooperate in its putative moral innocence.
Whatever else may be said for or against the actual policy set out by President Bush, it at least, unlike Weyrich's defense of it, shows discomfort with exploiting some stem cell lines. Why else would the President recoil from funding lines obtained after a certain date? But in his effort to rationalize the policy, Paul Weyrich proposes that the new stem cell policy is licit because the federal government will cooperate only with the means and actions of the “medical student,” but not with the means and actions of the “eccentric cutthroat.” The one uses a dirk to disembowel, the other a scalpel to dissect. Weyrich's distinction takes no notice of time. If his is the critical distinction, the conclusion will apply to the future, present, and past indifferently. The President, on the other hand, has tried to draw the line at 60 or so corpses from the past. Weyrich offers no grounds for any such restriction in his distinction. It would operate in Victorian London and Tudor London, in modern London and in the America of tomorrow.
But enough of this! The distinction is incoherent. It is self deception. The innocent medical student does not exist. Knock on his door. The Crown claims to wish to pay a call on Dr. Jeckyl alone, but Mr. Hyde insists that he lives there too. And Dr. Jeckyl is curiously intimate with him. If ever there was a case of legitimate guilt by association, we have it in the person of the doctors who offer to heal us if we will just overlook their friends, their confidantes, their esteemed colleagues, their “associates,” their very selves, who are making that healing possible by killing our children. We shouldn’t wait to hear from “the top moral experts of the pro-life universe” before concluding that we are in the wrong neighborhood. Or that the Crown’s call should be made, not via the Royal Society, but by Scotland Yard.
More could be said, and should be said, and thought, as we contemplate the awful prospect that opens before us.
For now, we beg Paul Weyrich, and all in the pro-life movement who may have been swayed by his long-deserved reputation to follow his newly-faulty thought. We beg you all, in the words of another Englishman, a sinner like us all, a man of action, and one who like us all was wrong in many things, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken!”
(Dr. Ferrier is president and David Quackenbush is senior fellow of the Declaration Foundation, a communications center for founding principles.)
