The living will was originally invented in 1967 by two groups, the Euthanasia Society of America and Euthanasia Education Council, and was touted as a first step in gaining public acceptance of euthanasia. These groups had been struggling for years to get mercy-killing bills (which would allow doctors to give disabled or dying patients lethal overdoses) passed in various state legislatures.
"Super-" is our most hallowed prefix, for it announces the marriage of two qualities that the modern world venerates: new and improved. If we can produce superconductors, fly at supersonic speeds, travel along superhighways, and attend Super-bowl games, why should we not direct our resourcefulness to our offspring and turn them into super-babies?
Faced with what most observers thought was a decision for or against funding research that destroys human embryos, President Bush chose a third option: To fund research on human embryos that have already been destroyed, but whose cell lines are being kept available in labs.That means that federal funds wont go to the destruction of human embryos. Thats no small thing in todays climate. At the same time, it would have been better to withhold money for any destructive research, whether the victims are dead or alive.
Many have unwittingly embraced the myth that Galileo Galilei, a 17th-century Italian astronomer, discovered the heliocentricity of the solar system and, because his discovery conflicted with Catholic teaching, was tortured until he recanted. All this is pure fabrication.
Infertility is a growing problem in the United States. And in true American fashion, there has been a corresponding growth in a "reproductive technologies industry" to provide a solution. In America we have a tendency to think that we can solve all problems with the right "technology." But children are not engendered by technology or produced by an industry.
The world changed when it was announced in February of 1997 that scientists working for a private research institute in my former homeland of Scotland had cloned a sheep. The world was taken by total surprise. Technology first, typically by surprise; ethics and policy later, if at all. Four years later, here in the U.S. we still have no policy. There are few more worrying facts in the modern world. Let me offer three comments.
A team of infertility specialists at the Institute for Reproductive Medicine and Science at St. Barnabas Medical Center said they helped produce 15 children with foreign DNA added to that which the children naturally inherited from their mothers and fathers. The news was met with an outcry from ethicists and from other scientists, who accused the team of playing God and of ignoring potentially disastrous side effects in their haste to dabble in genetic engineering.
I warmly welcome your visit on the occasion of the International Congress of Catholic Obstetricians and Gynecologists, at which you are reflecting upon your future in the light of the fundamental right to medical training and practice according to conscience.
The books title, Body Bazaar, is a pun on the strangeness of how elements of the human body DNA, umbilical cord blood, embryos, bone, tissue have become products for a burgeoning global biotechno-mart. For doctors harvesting human tissue, the body has become (changing the metaphor) a gold mine.
