Nije imao svoje ali nije ni jeo fetuse. Učestvovao je legalno u istraživanju.
Bilo je to na kongresu:
Testimony of Richard M. Doerflinger on behalf of the Committee for Pro-Life Activities United States Conference of Catholic Bishops before the Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Senate Appropriations Committee
Hearing on Stem Cell Research
July 18, 2001
I am Richard M. Doerflinger, Associate Director for Policy Development at the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. I am grateful for this opportunity to present the Catholic bishops' grave concerns on this critically important issue.
In our view, forcing U.S. taxpayers to subsidize research that relies on deliberate destruction of human embryos for their stem cells is illegal, immoral and unnecessary.
It is illegal because it violates an appropriations rider (the Dickey amendment) passed every year since 1995 by Congress. That provision forbids funding "research in which" human embryos (whether initially created for research purposes or not) are harmed or destroyed outside the womb.(1) National Institutes of Health guidelines approved by the Clinton Administration nonetheless give researchers detailed instructions on how to obtain human embryos for destructive cell harvesting, if they wish to qualify for federal grants in "human pluripotent stem cell research."(2) Clearly, obtaining and destroying embryos is an integral part of this project, even if the specific act of destroying embryos does not directly receive federal funds. By implementing these guidelines, the federal government would encourage researchers to conduct destructive embryo experiments that are punishable as felonies in some states.(3)
This proposal is immoral because it violates a central tenet of all civilized codes on human experimentation beginning with the Nuremberg Code: It approves doing deadly harm to a member of the human species solely for the sake of potential benefit to others. The embryos to be destroyed by researchers in this campaign are at the same stage of development as embryos in the womb who have been protected as human subjects in federally funded research since 1975.(4) President Clinton's National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC) and its 1994 predecessor, the NIH Human Embryo Research Panel, conceded that the early human embryo is a form of developing human life that deserves our respect(5). Treating human life as mere research material is no way to show respect.
Finally, this proposal is unnecessary because adult stem cells and other alternatives are already achieving some of the goals for which embryonic stem cells have been proposed, and new clinical uses are constantly being discovered.(6)
In our view, human life deserves full respect and protection at every stage and in every condition. The intrinsic wrong of destroying innocent human life cannot be "outweighed" by any material advantage -- in other words, the end does not justify an immoral means. Acceptance of a purely utilitarian argument for mistreating human life would endanger anyone and everyone who may be very young, very old, very disabled, or otherwise very marginalized in our society. However, even the Clinton Administration's bioethics advisors, who denied human embryos the moral status of "person," concluded that they could only be destroyed for research as a last resort, if no alternative course existed.(7)
It cannot be denied that these alternatives are available. To be sure, further study will be needed to determine their full potential. But to fund destructive embryo research now, alongside these morally acceptable alternatives, would be to deny any moral status at all to human embryonic life. For that is what we would do if there were no moral issue at stake. Funding embryonic stem cell research here and now will force all taxpayers to act as though they agree with the international chairman of the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation that human embryos have no more value or dignity than a goldfish.(8)
This view of the human embryo as a goldfish has apparently garnered support from some members of Congress who have generally opposed abortion. Their claim is that human life does not begin until placed in a mother's womb. Biologically, however, this is an absurd claim. An embryo's development is directed completely from within -- the womb simply provides a nurturing environment. Scientists tell us it would be technically possible to nurture a human embryo in a man's body by abdominal pregnancy, or in a mammal of another species, or even (someday) in an artificial womb.(9) Upon being born could such a person morally be killed for his or her stem cells, because he or she never lived inside a woman's womb?
A subtly different argument has also emerged to try to justify using embryos from fertility clinics for destructive experiments. While human embryos ordinarily deserve respect, goes this argument, these particular embryos do not, because they "would be discarded anyway" by their parents. But this is, to say the least, fallacious reasoning. If parents were neglecting or abusing their child at a later stage, this would provide no justification whatever for the government to move in and help destroy the child for research material. We do not kill terminally ill patients for their organs, although they will die soon anyway, or even harvest vital organs from death row prisoners, although they will be put to death soon anyway. Federal law prohibits federally funded researchers from doing any harm to an unborn child slated for abortion, though that child will soon be discarded anyway (see 42 USC §289g). If people's value depends entirely on the extent to which other people "want" them, they have no inherent value at all. So on reflection, this argument ultimately reduces to the argument of "embryo as goldfish."
The argument also rests on a false premise. The embryos slated for destructive research under the NIH guidelines are those deemed to be "in excess of clinical need" by fertility clinics. This simply means that they are not needed or wanted by their parents for reproduction at present. Parents in this situation are routinely offered several options, including: saving the embryos for possible later use (by far the most frequently chosen), discarding them, or donating them to another couple so they can have a child. The NIH guidelines require that these parents be asked to consider donating their embryos for destructive cell harvesting at the same time that they are offered these other options.(10) Some couples who would otherwise have allowed their embryonic children to live -- in their own family or another -- will instead have them killed for government research. That is why the adoptive couples of some of these former "frozen embryos" have filed suit against the guidelines.(11)
We have presented our position on this issue at length in other testimony.(12) In the remainder of this testimony we would like to comment on recent developments, including new evidence that proponents of destructive embryo research have misrepresented or distorted the facts to serve their political goal.
New developments in alternatives to embryonic stem cell research
Since we testified before this subcommittee in 1999, startling advances have been made in adult stem cell research and other non-embryonic avenues for repairing or replacing damaged organs and tissues. The field of "tissue engineering" using adult cells has exploded as researchers move toward rebuilding ears, tracheas, and even hearts.(13) Adult stem cells have successfully treated hundreds of thousands of patients with cancer and leukemia; they have repaired damaged corneas, restoring sight to people who were legally blind; they have healed broken bones and torn cartilage in clinical trials; they are being used to help regenerate heart tissue damaged by a cardiac arrest.(14) Adult bone marrow stem cells were responsible for the first completely successful trial of human gene therapy, helping children with severe combined immunodeficiency disease to recover an immune system and safely leave their sterile environment for the first time.(15) Adult cells from a young paraplegic woman's own immune system, injected into the site of her spinal cord injury, have apparently cured her incontinence and enabled her to move her toes and legs for the first time – "generating hope for those with spinal-cord injuries around the world," as one news report observes.(16)
Finally, adult pancreatic islet cells from cadavers have been used to reverse juvenile diabetes in fifteen patients, and further human trials are being planned at several centers in the United States. At the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association on June 24, researchers announced that all patients benefitted from the transplants, and nine have remained "insulin free" for a median period of eight months – with some patients requiring no injections for up to two years.(17)
Hailed by experts as a "remarkable advance," this breakthrough has also received enthusiastic attention from Lee Ducat, founder of the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation (JDF). "There's still a lot to be learned, but this is the most optimistic I've been in 30 years," she says. "To take patients who are terribly ill and going in and out of shock and give them a normal life... this is an unbelievable result. They say they never knew what feeling normal is all about."(18)
Yet this good news has gone largely unnoticed by the current leadership of the JDF. Instead the organization is focused on diverting funds toward a misleading ad campaign to persuade Americans to support killing human embryos for their stem cells.
Neglect – even misstatement – of recent scientific data was also evident in last year's testimony before this subcommittee by the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation. Mr. Reeve, on behalf of the Foundation, testified that adult stem cells are no substitute for embryonic cells because they cannot be "pluripotent" but are confined to a narrow range of specialization. Yet a few weeks after that hearing, researchers funded by the NIH and the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation published a study indicating that adult bone marrow stem cells "may constitute an abundant and accessible cellular reservoir for the treatment of a variety of neurologic diseases." The first sentence of the published study states: "Pluripotent stem cells have been detected in multiple tissues in the adult, participating in normal replacement and repair, while undergoing self-renewal."(19) The authors cite eleven other studies in support of this observation. Their article, prepared under the aegis of Mr. Reeve's foundation, was received for publication in March 2000, before Mr. Reeve testified in April that adult stem cells cannot be pluripotent.
An author of that study, Dr. Darwin Prockop, told this subcommittee last year that the implications of his work should not be overstated and that he himself supports funding both embryonic and adult stem cell research. However, medical and patient groups have now tilted the pendulum so far toward outright denial of the facts about the promise of adult stem cell research that Dr. Prockop recently felt obliged to correct the record. Responding to an article that questioned the benefits of adult stem cells, he notes:
More than 20 years ago, Friedenstein and then others grew adult stem cells from bone marrow called mesenchymal stem cells or marrrow stronal cells (MSCs). MSCs differentiate into bone, cartilage, fat, muscle, and early progenitors of neural cells. Human MSCs can be expanded up to a billionfold in culture in about 8 weeks. Preliminary but promising results have appeared in the use of MSCs in animal models for parkinsonism, spinal cord defects, bone diseases, and heart defects. Also, several clinical trials are in progress. In addition, there are promising results with other adult stem cells that perhaps we may yet learn how to grow effectively.(20)
https://www.usccb.org/issues-and-ac...o-research-is-illegal-immoral-and-unnecessary
... очекују како да не!
