Don't you just love it when the media claims to have found the "Catholic" position on a particular issue? Consider the following from the Detroit Free Press: "Catholics Allowed Pro-Choice Vote"; or this ludicrous headline from the Los Angeles Times: "Devout Catholic answers call to challenge church: James Carroll, a former priest, uses his personal journey to drive 'Constantine's Sword.'" Recently I came across another one of these stories in the Wall Street Journal: "The Devout Doctor's Prescription: How Donald Landry reconciled science with religion and got the attention of Washington." As my eyes scanned the front-page headline I felt a tinge of hope. Finally, a good Catholic seemed to have made a breakthrough that will resolve the embryonic stem cell debate down in Washington. As it turns out, however, the devout doctor's prescription merely replaces one dubious scientific procedure for another.
Donald Landry, chairman of Columbia University's department of medicine, seems to be the "devout Catholic" the Journal says he is. He was an altar boy, he thought about becoming a priest, he attends daily Mass, and even owns a recording of the televised funeral of John Paul II. He opposes abortion and also thinks "society should be wary of" scientific procedures that destroy "nascent human life." So far, so good.
"As a man of faith," reports journalist Gautam Naik, "Dr. Landry believed harvesting stem cells from a human embryo was an immoral destruction of life. As a doctor, he believed stem-cell advances could save lives." Dr. Landry's aim, then, was to discover a method of harvesting embryonic stem cells in a manner that did not violate his conscience or his Catholic faith. Landry was successful, or so the Journal argues:
One Sunday afternoon, steeped in articles about the political clash, he had what he calls an epiphany: Master stem-cell lines, he hypothesized, could be derived from embryos that were created during in-vitro fertilization procedures but whose cells had stopped dividing naturally. Such embryos, he reasoned, were dead, because they wouldn't continue growing if implanted in a womb. But they would still contain some healthy cells. If those cells could yield fresh tissue that could be used to treat disease or test medicines, there shouldn't be ethical objections. Dr. Landry says he picked up the phone to run his idea past an embryologist at Columbia. The colleague confirmed that after a typical in-vitro fertilization procedure, about half of embryos stop growing because of genetic abnormalities. Many of those embryos, known as mosaics, have a mixture of normal and abnormal cells.
In brief, Dr. Landry proposes resolving the embryonic stem cell debate by taking cells from "arrested" or nonviable embryos created through IVF. Despite his commitment to the Church, this is where Dr. Landry fails to abide by Her teachings. As the Journal rightly observes: "Dr. Landry's approach depends on in-vitro fertilization, which the Vatican opposes."
For his part, Dr. Landry "is willing to diverge from the Catholic Church's position on in-vitro fertilization." My work "stands up" with no "downside," he avows. "I think I've found a potentially simple answer to the problem." Use "dead embryos rather than live ones." Yet, to admit that he must "diverge" from the Church in order to pursue his research discredits the idea that he struck a balance between science and religion and that he did so without "violating the ethical sensibilities" of his faith.
Dr. Landry justifies his support of IVF by saying it is a procedure that "creates life, not kills it." His reasoning is fallacious. After all, rape is a means of creating life. Are we supposed to agree that rape is therefore an ethical act? Just because an act results in the creation of life does not mean that act is moral. The assumption behind Landry's argument is that "life is good" — and that IVF doesn't hurt anyone the way rape does. But this is precisely where Dr. Landry departs from the Church. For Landry, it doesn't appear to matter how life is created, just that it is created. As in the case with rape, however, the Church holds that the means do matter.
The Church clearly expresses its teaching on artificial reproductive technologies (ART) in a 1987 document, Donum Vitae (Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation: Replies to Certain Questions of the Day). As regards IVF and other forms of ART, Donum Vitae states: "The medical act is not, as it should be, at the service of conjugal union but rather appropriates to itself the procreative function and thus contradicts the dignity and the inalienable rights of the spouses and of the child to be born" (II, 7). To conceive a child through the intervention of ART, continues the instruction, is to "depriv[e] [the baby] of its proper perfection: namely, that of being the result and fruit of a conjugal act in which the spouses can become 'cooperators with God for giving life to a new person.' These reasons enable us to understand why the act of conjugal love is … the only setting worthy of human procreation" (II, 5). In other words, the Church holds that life should only be created through the conjugal act. Only in this act are the rights of parents and child preserved.
Furthermore, to argue that IVF is morally licit simply because it creates life is to deny the fact that the reproductive technology industry is institutionally dependent upon the destruction of human life. Five hundred embryos alone lost their lives just to create the first ART baby, Louise Brown. It is estimated that as many as 1 million embryos have been destroyed since IVF was introduced in the United States in 1981. Similarly, the actual live-birth success rate for ART is a mere 29 percent. Hence, well over 70 percent of all embryos created through ART do not survive. Thousands more children who reach the fetal stage are killed via selective or "multifetal pregnancy" reduction, a euphemism used to refer to a first trimester abortion.
Dr. Landry argues that nonviable embryos created through ART can (and should) be used for research purposes. Yet Donum Vitae explicitly addresses the very question of how "to evaluate morally the use for research purposes of embryos obtained by fertilization 'in vitro'" (I, 5). The Church's answer: "It is immoral to produce human embryos destined to be exploited as disposable 'biological material'" (I, 5). Concludes the instruction: "In consequence of the fact that they have been produced in vitro, those embryos which [are] not transferred into the body of the mother and are called 'spare' are exposed to an absurd fate, with no possibility of their being offered safe means of survival which can be licitly pursued" (I, 5).
Granted, Landry might argue that he is not creating embryos to destroy them, but only using "disposable" embryos for other research purposes. But Dr. Landry's research methods could not proceed without the illicit creation of these embryos. Moreover, as Donum Vitae demonstrates, to create human life through the use of ART is to violate the human rights of the parents and of the baby — in part, because the embryo mortality rate associated with ART is so high. As the Journal reports above, a "typical in-vitro fertilization procedure" results in "half" a batch of live embryos and "half" a batch of dead ones. It is fair to say, then, that by relying on IVF for his research Dr. Landry knows that he is benefiting from a medical procedure that will result in the death of half of the embryos that it creates.
Being a "devout" Catholic requires uncompromising fidelity to the Church's teaching on matters of faith and morals. The Church's position on IVF is clear: all human life is sacred from the moment of conception until the moment of natural death. In fact, just days after the Journal published its article, Pope Benedict XVI affirmed the Church's teaching on stem cell research. "On this matter the position of the Church is clear," the Holy Father told a June 27, 2007, Wednesday audience that included researchers assembled to discuss the use of adult stem cells to treat cardiac patients. "Scientific research must be encouraged and promoted, so long as it does not harm other human beings, whose dignity is inviolable from the very first stages of existence."
Contrary to Dr. Landry's claim that IVF is licit because it "creates life, not kills it," in vitro fertilization not only promotes the destruction of innocent human life, it violates the parents' and the baby's human rights in the process — the very problems the good doctor was trying to avoid. As a Catholic, Dr. Landry cannot simply "sidestep" IVF in order to support embryonic stem-cell research. In doing so, he is neither "reconciling science with religion" nor remaining faithful to the Catholic Church.
