A Simple Truth
Finally, there is nothing that seems colder than responding to someone’s cry of pain with an analytical argument from ethics and theology. This is what I hear our spokespeople doing on the talk shows, and this will never advance our cause. On one side, you have the grief-filled soccer mom whose teenager has a spinal cord injury. Her doctors have sold her on the magic bullet of stem cell research, and she is clinging to it as her only hope. “Anything that will allow my son to walk again must be done.” This is answered by an anti-stem cell research spokesperson that with an embarrassed wince, murmurs something like, “These are difficult matters but a standard principle of ethics is that we are not allowed to do an evil act to bring about a good.” It’s pathetic. I don’t even want to agree with the anti-stem cell spokesman, and I profoundly agree with him!
I don’t know what the most effective strategy of argument will be for the Church in the ESCR debate. I do know that in terms of swaying public debate, there is nothing as persuasive as a voice of authority speaking a short compelling statement of truth.
Two thousand years later, people are still running around, “exhausted and confused, like sheep without a shepherd.” They will gravitate towards strength and they will embrace accessible truths that they can integrate into their own moral framework. The goal is to draw people into a journey that will lead to depth of understanding.
But most people will be satisfied with the measure of peace that they can find in a statement as simple as this: “We are never allowed to experiment on anyone without their permission.”
Barbara Nicolosi teaches screenwriting to aspiring Catholic writers at the acclaimed Act One: Writing for Hollywood. You may email her at [email protected].
(Originally published in LIGUORIAN Magazine, One Liguori Drive, Liguori, MO, 63057.)
That Old “Slippery Slope'
When you hear television pundits pining for “common ground” on the matter of when it is acceptable to experiment on human offspring, it’s a safe bet the slippery slope has been joined.
American society has whizzed right through the tape guarding the sanctity of human life. It is exhausting to speculate on how much worse the moral landscape will look from up on the metal podium, but we have no other choice.
Embryonic stem cell research (ESCR) is the latest apple dangling from the tree of medical science. If we are to believe celebrities like Christopher Reeve, Mary Tyler Moore and Michael J. Fox, ESCR portents a grand elixir that will cure Multiple Sclerosis, Diabetes and Parkinson’s disease. All that is necessary to eradicate the sufferings of millions is to suck stem cells out of the inner mass of human embryos.
Stem cells are less specialized cells that give rise to the more specialized cells of the body such as brain, blood, skin, etc. The act of sucking out stem cells kills the embryo. In one of the most bizarre revelations of the ESCR debate, the Washington Post recently reported that a prominent privately owned biotechnology firm, Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) of Worcester, Massachusetts, has a plan to mass-produce human embryos through cloning and then kill them to harvest their stem cells. Judging from the pundits, some people find this horrific, some find it merely regrettable, and others don’t understand why it is even controversial.
Why We Are Losing..
Watching the debate unfold on news shows and in print, the Church and the pro-life movement seem once again caught off guard. Having been involved in several discussions myself recently on the subject; I understand why we are losing this debate.
I am certain that I would be more persuasive in the long run if I didn’t keep freaking out mid-way through an argument. “Do the words Brave New World mean anything to you?!” “This is what the Nazis did!” “An argument against fetal experimentation?! Sure, and then maybe we can come up with one against the ritual annihilation of Rugby players!”
Under the circumstances, freaking out is the most reasoned, human response to this truly macabre debate. But it isn’t very mature, because mature people see what is probably going to happen, and then are not surprised when it does. There is a self-defeating trend in the pro-life community to think that sooner or later, our society is going to mysteriously comprehend that we sanctity of human life people have been right all along. Any minute now, everyone is going to realize that it is always a bad idea for one group of human beings to decide that another group of human beings aren’t really people. We keep thinking that in order for us to create a respect life momentum, the anti-life momentum must first roll to a dead stop. It’s not going to happen. People like the promises of the Culture of Death.
We’re going to have to devise a winning marketing strategy directed at the masses that sells them on the better promises of the Culture of Life.
If we’re going to win the public debate we have to stop futilely appealing to the lessons of history, mostly because people don’t know their history anymore. A young woman I was talking to recently confided her conviction that “if fetuses were really people, most doctors certainly wouldn’t support abortion.” When I noted to her that in Nazi-Germany, the entire medical community signed on to euthanizing the chronically ill, the disabled and the mentally retarded, she looked at me with slit eyes and a self-assured shrug and said, “That sounds like pro-life propaganda to me.”
On a FOX News Channel debate about stem cell research, the pro-life spokeswoman eventually in desperation got around to comparing the arguments being used to justify ESCR to “how the Nazi doctors rationalized their own gruesome experiments in concentration camps.” She was right. The transcripts of the Nuremburg doctor trials hold chillingly similar justifications to the ones we are hearing now for ESCR. But her comments were met with petulant disapproval from the talk show host who intervened in the debate saying, “There is no reason to get so ugly. Comparing this research to Nazi horrors does nothing but enflame the issue.”
The references that we pro-lifers make to Nazi-Germany don’t work mainly because in popular culture, the Third Reich is accepted as the most evil phenomenon in human history. The Holocaust has received more media and movie attention than any other dark episode. I have long thought that the seventy year Gulag and Mao’s Cultural Revolution might hold many more stories of atrocity, but the fact is that the Nazis are the popular culture standard for the worst evil ever.
People think that the very air in Germany was putrid, and the whole climate as though the dark abscess of hell had overflowed into the streets. They don’t see this kind of world around them in American society. People meet comparisons with Nazi atrocities with a smug, “We’re not THAT bad.”
Oddly, in the effort to make sure it never happens again, the media emphasis on the Holocaust has made it such an extraordinary event, that we can only see it in the aggregate, and not in the millions of tiny evil choices – like those by the German medical profession – that made it possible.
Another argument that doesn’t work is the aforementioned appeal to “the slippery slope.” If there is anything we can learn from history, it is that human beings never learn from history. Every generation thinks it is smarter than the ones before. No generation has been able to rein in its own hungers in the interests of those who will follow centuries later. There is a coping mechanism in the public consciousness that the problems of tomorrow will be resolved in the technology of tomorrow. Our appeals to “where ESCR might lead” are moot against this inner conviction.
