No Trespassing



If this decision, and especially its rationale, continue to be embraced as a victory by prominent leaders of that cause, and if they have their way, they will have put their own principles on the path to extinction.

Americans are being tempted to think that we should make moral decisions based on a calculus of costs and benefits instead of on a clear understanding of principle, and that it is licit to eat the fruit of the poisoned tree. It once was a well-understood principle in our law that if you have obtained a profit by violating a person’s rights, you may not keep your ill-gotten gains. But the policy we now follow violates this principle by approving the use of stem cells, i.e., body parts, however small, that have come from what the President called “life and death decisions already made.” From now on, this government will encourage research that is only possible if human lives are, or have been, intentionally destroyed.

Even if, as most Americans, including the President, believe, the killing of embryos is morally wrong, the policy means that it is a kind of good fortune, a “windfall,” that some have already been killed for the sake of using their parts, and we may, without moral peril, invite the research community to see what use can be made of their remains. But there would be no such parts if those who killed human beings to use them as lab fodder thought there would be sanctions against this barbarism.

Now we reward with government funding some who systematically broke the ethical code on human experimentation. Will not they and others continue to disregard ethical limits? Have we not already heard cries from the enemies of life that there are “not enough” of these embryonic stem cell lines for their exploitation? Market demand, and the scientific and therapeutic “advances” that will emerge from such ruthless exploitation, will conspire to further blunt outrage over these and other practices, while increasing the pressure for supplies of embryonic specimens. The gates may be barred for now, but profit and misguided pity will beat on them relentlessly.

Before the great stem cell research flurry, adoption of “extra” embryos was emerging among the in-vitro fertilization community as a promising option to give these tiny persons their chance to be born. Such genuine moral concern in the treatment of all embryos is now to be replaced by the following three criteria governing which stem cell lines may be the object of government-funded research. First, every embryo used in the research must have been destroyed with the informed consent of its parents. Second, the destroyed embryos must have been obtained from an in-vitro fertilization clinic, i.e., not produced explicitly for experimentation by bio-tech labs, etc. Third, “donors” of the destroyed embryos may not have received financial inducement for their act.

Does this help? These criteria are intended to give the appearance of moral discrimination, and by implication are intended to limit research to embryos whose destruction was less unacceptable than that of others. But what is the basis for this distinction, and what are its roots? Is it not the judgment that destruction of embryonic human beings is somehow closer to licit if it follows the free and private choice of the parents? Where have we seen this kind of thinking before?

Let me be plain. This is Roe v. Wade again – the logic of abortion. And, as with every tiny victim of Roe v. Wade in the 28 years of sorrow that have followed that decision, so here the unalienable right to equal protection as a human person has, for each destroyed embryo, utterly been violated. It does not matter how the process is described and wrapped about with talk of “consenting” adults and the quality of their choice. Parents have never had the right, nor “color like to right,” to sign over a live child to a doctor for destruction, or to a scientist for dissection, however unwanted by its parents that child may be, and no matter the relief to the woman nor the boon to science.


(Dr. Keyes is founder and chairman of the Declaration Foundation, a communications center for founding principles.)



The evil of embryonic destruction is not ameliorated by criteria restricting research to embryos whose parents chose to have them killed. The attempt has instead landed us back in the heart of the evil Roe v. Wade doctrine of the so-called right to choose. Rationalization is not reasoning. It should be sobering to see how the rationalizations proposed to justify harvesting to death some embryos conceal the heart of darkness that has been corrupting our moral consciences since Roe v. Wade.

The cancer of Roe v. Wade will continue to poison our reason until it is cut out. And now the market push to see in embryos “property and product” is on with a vengeance. Government funding, it is argued, will bring ethical regulation. But our experience with government endorsement of the abortion industry suggests the contrary. Government subsidies and protection will predictably drive a rapidly expanding market pressure to trade in human flesh. With this policy America as a regime now risks the distinction of being morally complicit in a new slave trade. We are indeed in a brave new world.

Innocent human life will likely now be sacrificed anew upon utilitarian altars, and human persons reduced to the status of property. This would violate all norms of bioethical standards, including the norms that have informally and formally pertained in American in-vitro fertilization medical practices, until now. Natural death or cryopreservation for embryonic human life has been widely respected up to this point. But human equality and the Hippocratic Oath are in danger of being cast on the ash heap of history with the full sanction, authority and, yes, international prestige of the American federal government. Now, the pressure is on to relegate embryonic human beings to the status of “products,” and market or otherwise exploit them. This is, of course, a long-anticipated and dreaded outcome of the logic of abortion, and an extension of the industry in body parts it has spawned.

Every minute embryonic life has an intrinsic claim to dignity equal to that of every live human being, in whatever condition or stage of development, from the instant of creation to the instant of natural death. Neither we ourselves, nor anyone on our behalf, has the right to transfer, sell or trade our life, nor forfeit or fatally dispose of our life. Innocent life is not ours, in other words, to “consent” away. That’s what it means to call the right to life “unalienable.” Parents have no natural or legal right to have a child killed, “wanted” or not.

Killing embryos in order to use their bodies violates not only religious principles, but American ones. We back away from the Declaration principle that all men are created equal when we start making up lines of demarcation between the equal people and the less equal people. Today, to suit our convenience, we contemplate placing embryonic human beings in the lab on the wrong side of the line. Meanwhile, to suit another set of conveniences we draw the line against babies in the womb. And when abortion and embryo-harvesting have helped us get accustomed to basing the boundary of humanity on accidents of time and place, we will move on to draw other lines, as the gods of utility shall claim to reveal them to us.

The crucial battle that must be fought now is not against diseases of the body, however urgent that battle may be. It is the battle to make the new world of technological possibility safe for human dignity. To do this, we must act in the Light shed by the Declaration of Independence, that we are all of us created equal, and that no scientific board, or council of elders, or court – or any other human power – gets to decide and impose a view of inequality based on benefits they hope to derive from where the line is drawn. In the long and dark past of humanity, when self-interest has been put in competition with principle, principle has all too often lost. If we, in our time, acquiesce in such line-drawing, instead of posting a principled “no-trespassing” sign in defense of all human offspring, we will have darkened our future immeasurably.

Even if there are benefits from killing the innocent, we don't have the right to derive those benefits at the expense of human dignity. It is as simple as that.

Subscribe to CE
(It's free)

Go to Catholic Exchange homepage

MENU