Editorial: Trading in flesh

Sydney
15 December 2002

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Editorial: Trading in flesh

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Editorial: Trading in flesh

The buying and selling of human flesh is one of the oldest of sins. In its ancient form it was called slavery. The use of human embryos for research purposes may seem a world away from this awful ancient trade, but we are still dealing in human flesh. Make no mistake, embryos are going to be bought and sold.

Indeed, a $45 million grant to fund the stem cell centre, headed by Professor Alan Trounson, is presently hanging in the balance. Funding has been held up while Prime Minister John Howard conducts an inquiry following the professor’s less than full disclosure regarding the results of recent embryonic stem cell research – results which have not been as stunning as claimed.

Legislation allowing the destruction of human embryos for research purposes was passed by 45 to 26 votes by the Senate last week. The 46-hour ‘conscience’ debate was one of the longest parliamentary debates ever held and the Senate committee that discussed the bill drew a staggering 1851 submissions. Only 48 of these were in favour of embryonic research.

It is easy to get caught up in the emotion of this debate – the emotion on both sides. The thought of killing anything human so appals most Christians that it is hard for them to imagine the passion on the other side of the debate – the passion of people who say we should be doing all we can to cure the sicknesses that afflict those already born.

They see embryos as a speck of cells at the bottom of a petri dish and as such as being less than human. This less-than-human argument has been used before – and by people most of us would not like to be associated with.

Nazi doctors experimented on people they considered less than human. This led to the 1946 Nuremberg directive, which emerged from the war crimes trials. It says that experiments on humans require their informed consent. This was augmented by the World Medical Association’s 1964 Helsinki Declaration that it is the duty of physicians “to protect life, health, privacy and the dignity of the human subject”.

But more recent legislation making abortion legal introduced the idea that a foetus is not quite human, opening the door for the embryonic stem-cell research bill.

It is worth reflecting that slavery was once considered acceptable because slaves weren’t seen as being equal to their masters, but as something less than human.

We already know the DNA of an embryo is identical to that of the adult it is destined to become. Scientifically speaking, the two are exactly the same.

How long then can the fiction be maintained that an embryo is not human while the person it becomes is?