By Hilary White
LONDON, June 4, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Catholic Church, says the new head of Britain’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), has only recently invented the notion that a human being must be protected from the first moment of conception and is trying to block medical progress by its opposition to embryo research.
In an interview with the Guardian newspaper May 28, Dr. Lisa Jardine, the recently appointed chairman of the HFEA, the government-appointed body that licences embryo research, said that the “one fatal impediment” to the advance of embryonic stem cell research and cloning, is the “the late 20th-century Catholic church’s commitment to fertilisation of the egg as being the moment of humanity”.
Jardine says she is “not a whit dismayed” by the ethical problems presented by the HFE Bill’s provisions to create human/animal hybrid clones or to use embryonic human beings for medical research. In fact, she says she enjoys the life and death implications of her new position.
Jardine is a British intellectual who was appointed this April as chairman of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. Her academic background is in early modern history and she is professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary College at the University of London. Dr. Jardine, who calls herself an “extremely devout” “non-sectarian believer” in values and moral judgments, told the Guardian’s Sarah Boseley that this teaching is a recent Catholic invention. “Now that wasn’t true in the 19th century – the Catholic church did not believe that then,” she said.
“Thinking Catholics”, she said, also believe that the Church should “roll back” the sanctity of human life to 14 days. “In which case, we’d all be able to talk to one another. At the moment, it’s a fatal impediment. There’s nothing we can do about it.”
The 4th century Doctor of the Church, St. Augustine, “who I greatly revere”, Jardine said, “believed that the child became human when it kicked in the womb, so that would be 19 weeks.” Other religions “of the book”, meaning Islam and Judaism, “have post-14-day beginnings of consciousness, so only 21st-century Catholicism has this problem,” she asserted.
“I’ve been sent wonderful books by Catholic philosophers arguing for moving the moment back to 14 days. That would be so elegant, to move it back to 14 days. So when we talk about entrenched religious positions, we’re not [actually] talking about entrenched religious positions, we’re talking about a doctrinal problem. And neither Islam nor Judaism has it, and nor does the Anglican church, and nor, as far as I know, do the Lutheran or Calvinist churches.”
But Dr. Jardine, whose academic background does not include training in either theology, Church history, bioethics or human embryology, may be surprised to find that she is also opposed by the entirety of the scientific consensus of the field of human embryology.
The idea that an embryo “becomes” an “individuated” human being at 14 days was invented by secular bioethicists in the late 1970s in the early days of in vitro fertilisation research. The same bioethicists have, through their testimony, informed and helped craft embryo research legislation around the world. Human embryologists, however, have only rarely been asked to give testimony before governments who seek to legalise or regulate embryo research.
Contradicting the settled findings of the field of human embryology, bioethicists have maintained the existence of the “pre-embryo” based on this arbitrary 14-day cut-off. This term, however, and its universally cited 14-day period, has been specifically rejected by the scientific authorities in the field. The Nomenclature Committee of the American Association of Anatomists specifically rejected the terms “pre-embryo,” “preembryonic” and “individuation” for inclusion in Terminologia Embryologica, the official lexicon of the field of embryology.
John Smeaton, director of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), said the problem is not with the intelligence of Lisa Jardine, which, he says, “is well-evidenced”. “The problem lies with the very low standard of decision-making expected of the HFEA by the legislators who established it under the 1990 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act.”
Anthony Ozimic, SPUC political secretary, shredded Jardine’s assertion that the Catholic Church has only recently adopted its defence of human life from conception. He wrote, “The Catholic church and its leading authorities, from the earliest times to today, have always forbidden the destruction of the fruits of conception.”
“Differences of opinion among theologians before the mid-19th century related not to embryo destruction (which was always forbidden by the church), but at which stage of development the embryo possessed a soul and whether lighter or harsher penalties should be applied for embryo destruction before and after the soul’s presence.”
Indeed, the Catechism of the Catholic Church does not concern itself with metaphysical arguments over “ensoulment”. It says only that the embryo “must be treated from conception as a person…must be defended in its integrity, cared for, and healed, as far as possible, like any other human being.”
Ozimic pointed out that it was scientific discoveries in the mid-19th century about the nature of the embryo that finally affirmed the Church’s prohibition on the destruction of unborn children.