Opinion: President - Elect Obama Set to Remove Protection of Embryonic Life?

With the stroke of a pen human embryos would become property, capable of being "manufactured" like a commodity, and available to be used as spare parts.

CHESAPEAKE, VA (Catholic Online) - Not even a week into the President Elect's transition, reports from the inside of his own transition team signal the danger of a potential use of the Presidential pen in the new U.S. administration.

The Washington Post reported on Sunday: "Transition advisers to President-elect Barack Obama have compiled a list of about 200 Bush administration actions and executive orders that could be swiftly undone to reverse White House policies on climate change, stem cell research, reproductive rights and other issues, according to congressional Democrats, campaign aides and experts working with the transition team.... The sources confirmed that "A team of four dozen advisers, working for months in virtual solitude, set out to identify regulatory and policy changes Obama could implement soon after his inauguration. The team is now consulting with liberal advocacy groups, Capitol Hill staffers and potential agency chiefs to prioritize those they regard as the most onerous or ideologically offensive, said a top transition official who was not permitted to speak on the record about the inner workings of the transition."

Additionally, other significant protections on human life are alleged to also be at risk from the stroke of the same Presidential pen. The Post continued: "Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) said that during Obama's final swing through her state in October, she reminded him that because the restrictions were never included in legislation, Obama "can simply reverse them by executive order." Obama, she said, "was very receptive to that." Opponents of the restrictions have already drafted an executive order he could sign. The new president is also expected to lift a so-called global gag rule barring international family planning groups that receive U.S. aid from counseling women about the availability of abortion, even in countries where the procedure is legal, said Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, he rescinded the Reagan-era regulation, known as the Mexico City policy, but Bush re-imposed it. "We have been communicating with his transition staff" almost daily, Richards said. "We expect to see a real change."

So, with the stroke of a pen human embryos would become property, capable of being "manufactured" like a commodity, and available to be used as spare parts in experimentation which has produced no discernible scientific results. It is all even more troubling because adult stem cell research and fetal chord blood research have actually shown significant promise but have received little or no attention or research support. Most importantly, the use of these stem cells is never deadly. Every so called "extraction" of embryonic stem cells kills a living human embryo. I write as a Catholic Christian who warned of the implications of the new administrations' pledge to Planned Parenthood to pass the evil "Freedom of Choice Act" which would enshrine the results of the Roe and Doe opinions into Federal law and remove every limiting restriction on abortion on demand. Now, this news from inside the transition team of the President elect indicates that the grave dangers to human life may begin even before the new President has a chance to make good on that promise.

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In 1987, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of the Holy See issued its important teaching entitled "Instruction on Respect for Human Life in its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation". Among the many questions it answered with absolute clarity was: "What Respect is due to the human embryo, taking into account his nature and identity?" The answer given by the Magisterium: "The human being must be respected - as a person - from the very first instant of his (her) existence." Unfortunately, the prevailing view of human rights entrenched in American judicial precedent and legislation denies the equal protection of the law to the human embryonic person. American law refuses to recognize that human embryos have a right to life and a right to a future. There are a number of differing philosophical arguments offered to promote the lie that these fundamental rights are conferred by positive civil law rather than by the Natural Law. Most of these arguments reserve the use of the concept of "person" to those humans who are deemed to somehow be "independent" and/or "autonomous". They are also promoted by people who now call themselves "medical ethicists". These folks have substantial academic degrees and professional pedigree and sit on Advisory Councils.

Some of these new "ethicists" try to make a distinction between "potential" and "actual" human persons and relegate the child in the womb to the category of being only a "potential" human person. Others view interdependency as a negative and insist on independence and "autonomy" as a criterion for any human rights to ever attach. Some equate the human embryo's dependency on the mother as a form of "non-personhood". Still others propose a progressive notion of consciousness as indicative of a growing presence of "personhood". A few concede that human embryos are human beings but deny they are persons. We find all of these ideas in the field sadly referred to these days as "Bio-Ethics" even though such positions are anything but ethical. We find them in textbooks being used to teach the subject to future medical practitioners. (See, e.g., Singer and Kuhse, "Bioethics")

For example, an "ethicist" named Michael Tooley denies the child in the womb should have any rights at all. His rationale evolved over time. In each version, as scientific research cast serious doubt on his claims, he conveniently shifted his ground to reach the same conclusion. Yet, human embryology and developmental biology affirm that a human embryo is not distinct in kind from a human being, but a human being at an early stage of development. Even prior to implantation, a human embryo is a unique living human being with the genetic constitution and epigenetic primordial that continues to develop throughout his or her life. However, the right not to be killed in the womb, the right to be born and the right to participate in human relationships are rejected for these little persons. Human embryonic lives are reduced to what one astute Catholic philosopher and lawyer, Robert George, called a "pre-personal way of being human".

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The idea that people can be less than persons is now being applied to other stages of human development outside of the womb. The disabled (physically and mentally), the aged and the infirmed are increasingly denied the protection of the law. There is an emphasis on individual rights over relation and autonomy over solidarity. The late Servant of God John Paul wrote in "The Gospel of Life" concerning what he called this "remarkable contradiction". He further elaborated: "...the roots of the contradiction between the solemn affirmation of human rights and their tragic denial in practice lies in a notion of freedom which exalts the isolated individual in an absolute way, and gives no place to solidarity, to openness to others and service of them."(Par. 19)

This counterfeit notion of freedom also views comatose human beings as no longer worthy of being called "persons". Their caregivers are encouraged to stop giving them food and water. Seriously ill children are viewed as interlopers who should not continue to use medical and social resources. Whether the criteria for being recognized as a human person is a satisfactory level of brain function, an agreed upon notion of self awareness, non-dependency, individual autonomy, or some similar "acceptable" level of physical or mental capacity, this reduces the human being to a human doing, valuable not simply because they are members of our human family and gifts to be received but based upon their functionality and subject to deadly treatment once they are no longer of economic value.

There can be do debate that we were all once human embryos. We all lived in the first home of the whole human race, our mothers womb. For the Christian, we further profess that the Son of God, the Incarnate Word, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, was a human being, who, in the embryonic stage, lived in his mother's womb. At every age and stage of our "human-beingness", be it in the womb, as an infant, as a child, an adolescent, an adult, in our times of illness, in our old age, we have always been dependent on others and vulnerable. This is what it means to be a human being. The emphasis of the proponents of the culture of death on independence and autonomy informs a worldview that Pope John Paul II taught threatens the "...entire structure of human rights." (Gospel of Life, Par. 19)

Who will speak for human embryonic Life? We must and we must speak out with urgency against this possible deadly stroke of the new Presidents' pen if we hope to stop the spread of the Culture of Death and secure a future of authentic freedom for all God's children.

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