Politics
Tuesday December 18, 2001
CANADIAN PHYSICIANS FOR LIFE ON GOV'T APPROVAL OF EMBRYO RESEARCH
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Press Release - "Government Approval To Destroy Human Embryos Unacceptable"
VANCOUVER, BC, December 18, 2001 (LSN.ca) - Canadian Physicians for Life applauds the Minister of Health for proposing legislation on new medical technologies in Canada. The restrictions planned are long overdue.
While the new law correctly rejects intentional embryo creation for experimentation, it approves of destructive experimentation on embryos originally created as the children of infertile parents. It seems ethically inconsistent that the permissibility of experimentation up to 14 days on any one embryo relies on it not having been created for that purpose. If there is something wrong with a proposed action, surely it cannot be justified by recalling that one initially meant to do something else.
Treating a human embryo in this way is a declaration that it is not a good in and of itself, but that it has actually to be destroyed to yield good, moreover that its destruction must proceed while it is healthy and viable because its continued existence is not so useful to others as its destruction.
An arbitrary 14 day age limit is proposed to restrain this philosophy from being applied to older human beings. There is no logical reason or historic precedent why this restraint should be expected to hold, even if it were built on firmer foundations. No distinct biological marker supports the creation of a 14-day limit for permitting the destruction of a unique human being. The 14-day rule is capricious and unscientific.
The Canadian scientific community has limitless fields of exploration open to it which do not require the breach of this particular bulwark of principle. Such ethical firewalls are much easier to maintain than to rebuild in a crisis, and it would seem prudent and wise to expect this new technology to provide us with unforeseeable crises.
We recommend that all research on human embryos as well as any treatment that is not for their benefit be prohibited and not simply regulated as proposed. We have clearly set out our position in April 2001, when comment was invited by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. The request for public guidance with the embryo destruction issue has satisfied the etiquette of consultation, leaving the question of whether Canadian scientific restraint with human embryos will continue to reflect technical limits in preponderance to ethical ones.
Our position paper can be viewed at http://www.physiciansforlife.ca
Will Johnston, MD, President - Vancouver, BC
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