France to renew tight bioethics limits, critics hit Catholic lobbying
France’s parliament opened debate on revising its bioethics laws on Tuesday amid protests that Roman Catholic Church lobbying had thwarted plans to ease the existing curbs on embryonic stem cell research. The bill, originally meant to update a 2004 law in light of rapid advances in the science of procreation, would also uphold bans on surrogate motherhood and assisted procreation for gays.
The debate coincided with news of France’s first “saviour sibling,” a designer baby conceived in vitro to provide stem cells to treat a sibling suffering from a severe blood disorder.
Critics of the bill said last-minute changes by deputies of the governing conservative UMP party meant the revision would hardly change the restrictive law currently on the books. The text retains tight limits for research on embryonic stem cells, a technology the Church vigourously opposes because the in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) method used to produce them creates extra embryos that are later discarded.
“The Catholics have succeeded in imposing their view on embryos and seem to be succeeding in their attack on this method,” said François Olivennes, a leading fertility expert, told Europe 1 radio. “We already have a very retrograde law compared to those in Spain, Britain, Belgium, Netherlands and all of Scandinavia. Nothing is advancing.”
“We propose the authorisation” of this research, said Alain Claeys, a deputy from the opposition Socialist Party.
The French Catholic Church has made bioethics a priority issue and overseen reports, public meetings and lobbying efforts to oppose an easing and aim for a tightening of the current law. The bill does not meet all the Church’s demands, however. Among other things, it supports prenatal screening for Down’s syndrome, which if found usually leads to an abortion.
Paris Cardinal André Vingt-Trois kept up Catholic criticism of controversial new medical techniques, saying the “saviour baby” whose birth was announced on Tuesday was produced to be used to heal another child. “Are we going to become instruments? I’m completely opposed to that,” he said. Ten other bishops issued a statement calling the technique an ethical regression and asked: “What will the child say when it finds out it was a ‘designer baby’?”
Polish bishops call IVF “younger sister of eugenics”
Bishops of Poland’s influential Roman Catholic Church have branded in vitro fertilization (IVF) “the younger sister of eugenics” in a letter aimed at swaying lawmakers ahead of a parliamentary debate.
Their intervention, two weeks after the Vatican condemned the awarding of the 2010 Nobel Prize for medicine to IVF pioneer Robert Edwards, triggered an unusually sharp response from lawmakers who say the clergy should not meddle in politics.
“The in vitro method comes at great human cost. To give birth to one child … many humans suffer death at different stages of the medical process,” said the letter, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters on Tuesday.
The letter alluded indirectly to the practice of eugenics by Nazi Germany during World War Two, which involved ruthless medical experiments on prisoners and ethnic minorities as part of a drive to strengthen the “purity” of the German race.
Poland lacks laws precisely regulating IVF. Parliament will debate several bills ranging from a complete ban to ensuring full state co-financing of the procedure.
Read the full story by Gabriela Baczynska here. See also IVF spawns host of ethical issues.
Dr. Edwards is the reason why about 4 million more people exist. But to be ‘pro-life’ is to be pro-embryo, turning a blind eye to children who are wanted by their parents.
Obama’s stem cell switch another setback for U.S. conservatives
It’s another day in the life of the busy Obama administration. In this case, it means another day of despair for America’s social and religious conservatives.
President Barack Obama lifted restrictions on federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research on Monday, angering abortion opponents but cheering those who believe further scientific investigations could lead to breakthrough treatments for many diseases. You can see our report here.
Since taking office on Jan. 20, Obama has also lifted a ban on funding for overseas groups or clinics that provide or counsel on abortion services, rescinded a Bush administration rule to protect health workers who refuse to provide services and information on moral grounds, and publicly backed the constitutional separation between church and state which he said America’s founding fathers “wisely drew.”
This is a sharp departure from his predecessor, George W. Bush, whose eight years in office represented a challenge to the country’s liberals. Now it’s conservative Christians, who comprise a key base for the opposition Republican Party, who find themselves in a dilemma.
Religious and social conservatives oppose embryonic stem cell research because it involves destruction of human embryos.
Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, a leading member of the Republican Party’s conservative Christian wing, summed up this view in a statement: “If an embryo is a life, and I believe strongly that it is life, then no government has the right to sanction their destruction for research purposes.”
A faith based educational system? Yeah,..that teaches evolution, the big bang theory, that we evolved from monkeys? How is that faith based? So many people try to say that we are forcing are belief systems upon them, but what about evolutionists? Evolution is not a proven fact. I remember looking at the pictures of evolution from monkeys when I was young in science books and I noticed that the pictures showing the change from that time period with those monkeys having human feet. Why is that? To try to get me to believe something that Darwin himself said would be false when it came to the arguement of sub-species. When it comes to these wars, you cannot always blame it on religion. What about greed or just power? There are millions of christians and muslims in the world who don’t believe in war. That is what I meant when I talked about sancitfiying life. Even the bible says that on that day many will cry Lord, Lord and he tells them he didn’t know them. You can’t say we cause all the problems if there are so many of us against those things. On things getting worse…..How are they getting better? Because you cannot tell me they are. You’re right, God did give us minds to help prevent disease. My personal belief is that an embryo is life. But what about abortion? God surely didn’t give us the right to kill children who didn’t deserve it. I’m not talking about rape victims, I’m talking about those people who just don’t want the responsibility of a child. Once you give that person the right to abort, then it makes it ok for everyone and that’s not right.
Italy’s “Terry Schiavo case” even more like its U.S. precedent
UPDATE: Eluana Englaro died on Monday Feb. 9.
What’s been called “Italy’s Terry Schiavo case” is starting to resemble its U.S. precedent in more ways than one. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi ordered doctors on Friday not to disconnect the feeding tubes that the country’s top appeals court had ruled could be removed. Doctors had began withdrawing them on Friday before the order came from Rome.
Eluana Englaro, 38, has been in a vegetative state since a car crash in 1992. Her case has looked much like that of Schiavo, the American who spent 15 years in a vegetative state and was allowed to die in 2005 after a long court battle.
“Until we have a law about end-of-life issues, nutrition and hydration, because they are a form of vital life sustenance, cannot be suspended under any circumstances by those who are care-givers of people who are not self-sufficient,” Berlusconi said after making the case resemble the Schiavo drama even more by intervening to stop Englaro’s tubes from being removed. In the Schiavo case, President George Bush also stepped in at a late stage to try to block a court decision to disconnect her.
The cabinet acted in defiance of Italy’s President Giorgio Napolitano, who was opposed to dealing with the issue through a decree and has the power to block it. But Berlusconi said that if that happened he would call an emergency session of parliament, where he has a comfortable majority, to enact a law.
Catholic politicians, mostly in the centre right, have said that not feeding Englaro amounts to euthanasia, which is illegal in Italy, and had urged the government to intervene.
Vatican daily says pill pollutes, causes male infertility
The Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano published an article over the weekend claiming that the contraceptive pill pollutes the environment massively, contributes to male infertility and causes abortions. Those claims, if true, hit lots of hot buttons about science, ethics, faith and government policy. They should make headlines around the world. But apart from the Italian press, for which this is a home game, they haven’t. Why not?
It’s probably because the article also sets off lots of red lights for anyone trying to assess the validity of its claims. Its author Pedro José Maria Simón Castellví, head of the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, makes several scientific-sounding claims but basically asks the reader to accept them on faith. Castellví says his article is based on a 100-page report by a Swiss doctor, Rudolf Ehmann, but doesn’t quote directly from it or say where it can be found. This can’t be for lack of space, because he fills several lines with florid praise for the report with comments such as: “The original German text is beautifully written … it is written with all the scientific requirements, without any inferiority complex toward any discussion of obstetrics and gynaecology…”
The article’s headline — “Humanae Vitae – A Scientific Prophesy” — also hints its purpose is probably more religious than scientific. Humanae Vitae is the 1968 encyclical that reaffirmed the Church ban on artificial birth control. Its 40th anniversary last July prompted a series of Catholic statements, articles and conferences defending what was probably the most controversial encyclical of the 20th century. The major bioethics paper put out by the Vatican last month made several references to Humanae Vitae to bolster its argument.
Castellví’s article is still only available in the original Italian. Silvia Aloisi in our Rome bureau provided FaithWorld with this quick summary of the article and comment in the Italian press:
The contraceptive pill is abortive, pollutes the environment and contributes to male infertility, according to an article published in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano. The head of the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations (FIAMC), Pedro José Maria Simón Castellví, wrote in the article that the pill had “devastating effects on the environment by releasing tonnes of hormones into nature.”
“We have sufficient evidence to state that a non-negligible cause of male infertilityin the West is the environmental pollution provoked by by-products of the pill,” he said. This was a “clear anti-environmental effect demanding further explanation by manufacturers.”
Castellví gave no further details but said the findings were documented in a 100-page report recently published by his federation. He also said that the contraceptive pill, even when it had low hormone levels, was in many cases abortive because it prevented the embryo’s implantation into the woman’s womb.
The deputy chairman of the Italian Society of Contraception dismissed the article as “science fiction. “Gianbenedetto Melis told Italy’s Ansa news agency: “The pill cannot provoke an abortion because it blocks ovulation, and if there is no egg to be fertilised there can be no pregnancy.” Flavia Fronconi, a pharmacologist, said “the world is full of substances with oestrogen effects … Even a plastic bottle left in the sun releases oestrogen ‘polluting’ the liquid that we drink.”
Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, former president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, was cautious about the link made in the article between the pill and male infertility. “It’s true that the spreading of hormones in the environment increases the chances of multiple births and in turn provokes male infertility,” Sgreccia told the daily Corriere della Sera. “But there are several causes for this. And more than anything else, it stems from the fact that they are used in agriculture fertilisers, so they end up in vegetables and meat,” he said.
After some research on the Internet, I found Ehmann’s full report on the FIAMC website in the original German and a Spanish translation. There was only a four-page summary in English. In his report, Ehmann makes the claims mentioned in L’Osservatore Romano, sometimes with footnotes quoting scientific publications and sometimes not. It’s hard for a non-scientist to assess his scientific claims, but Castellví’s article gives the impression that it aims more to support doctrines than prove facts. One sceptical blogger who got the same impression asks whether “the people responsible for the conclusion reported by Castellví are the same who were involved in the ‘research’ supporting Intelligent Design.”
Does this article reflect actual Vatican thinking or is it just a trial balloon? That’s hard to say. The fact that these charges are published in the Vatican newspaper doesn’t mean they’re official, but it does hint that someone there takes them seriously. If they want to convince others, they’ll have to provide more proof.
It is irrelevant whether Vatican “thinking” is that birth control pills cause pollution and male infertility. It has been the Catholic Church’s position that all chemical or physical (barrier) methods of avoiding pregnancy are morally wrong and, in the case of the Pill, cause abortion, which is the killing of a human being.That is the story here.
Vatican reaffirms stand against IVF, designer babies, cloning
The Vatican issued a major document on bioethics today, “Instruction Dignitas Personae on Certain Bioethical Questions,” that outlines Roman Catholic teaching on the latest procedures concerning human reproduction. This is the third major Vatican document on bioethics in recent years after Donum Vitae (Gift of Life) in 1987 — issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), like today’s document — and Pope John Paul’s encyclical Evangelium Vitae (Gospel of Life) in 1995.
Our news story on the document is here, accompanied by a list of procedures it declared morally unacceptable and acceptable and selected quotes from the text. The full text in English is here. The Vatican also has comments from the news conference presenting the document (here all in Italian).
Much of this is a restatement and updating of known Vatican positions. The wording is in places quite strong and sound-bite-like, which may mean those passages could be intended for use in national political debates about bioethics. There is too much to comment on individually here, so go to the links for details.
John Thavis of Catholic News Service has a useful “Vatican bioethics document at a glance” and John Allen has a detailed analysis at “Vatican issues new document on biotechnology.”
One interesting angle is the argument in the conclusion that modern societies have already banned other practices that violate human dignity such as “racism, slavery, unjust discrimination and marginalization of women, children, and ill and disabled people.:” It encourages Catholics to show “courageous opposition to all those practices which result in grave and unjust discrimination against unborn human beings, who have the dignity of a person, created like others in the image of God.”
The document also speaks of spare frozen embryos as “orphans” but says it would be against human dignity to use them for research or give them up for “prenatal adoption” as some anti-abortion voices have suggested. “The thousands of abandoned embryos represent a situation of injustice which in fact cannot be resolved,” it says.
Incidentally, Slate columnist William Saletan also writes today about “The frozen ones: the morally deserted world of spare embryos.” He says there are about 500,000 such frozen embryos in the United States alone and many parents have just left them in that limbo. An abortion rights advocate, he makes no mention of the Vatican document and uses no religious argument. But he also bemoans the fact that the increased freedom and choice brought by these new reproductive measures have not been matched by increased ethical concern about the results:
Chris,
Since you seem so knowledgeable on those with no brains and condescendingly chide people to “get educated,” it’s spelled h-y-p-o-c-r-i-s-y.
You’re welcome.
Court allows cut-off in Italy’s “Terry Schiavo case”
Italy’s “Terry Schiavo case” has ended with the country’s top appeals court allowing a father to disconnect the feeding tube that has kept his comatose daughter alive for 16 years. Eluana Englaro, now 37, has been in a vegetative state at a hospital in northern Italy since a 1992 car crash. The Englaro case has been compared to that of American Terri Schiavo, who spent 15 years in a vegetative state before a long and very public dispute ended in 2005 with a court decision allowing her husband to have her feeding tube disconnected.
As in the Schiavo case, the Milan court that ruled on the case said it was convinced Englaro would prefer to die rather than be kept alive artificially. State prosecutors appealed that decision to the Cassation Court, the highest appeals court in Italy, and it was the Cassation Court’s decision on Nov. 13 that definitively settled the case.
This was the first time such a ruling has been made and upheld in Italy, where the influential Roman Catholic Church is implacably opposed to ending feeding and hydrating of patients in a vegetative state. Vatican Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan called the decision a “monstrous and inhuman murder” .
When the Schiavo and Englaro cases began, the lines in this ethical dilemma were fairly clearly drawn. On one side were those who said a persistent vegetative state (PVS) was enough to declare a patient effectively dead and disconnect feeding tubes. On the other were those, like the cardinal above, who said that patient was still alive. In 2006, brain scans revealed that a woman in PVS after suffering devastating brain damage in a car crash could imagine playing tennis or walking around her home when doctors asked her to do this.
Do those brain scans prove that PVS patients are still effectively alive? Should courts take that into account?
P.S. According to David Waters at the Washington Post‘s On Faith blog, a similar case is going on now in Washington where a hospital wants to stop treatment for a PVS boy but his Orthodox Jewish parents reject their standard of brain death as proof of death and want to wait until his heart stops.
Here’s a video from July when the Milan court ruled tht Englaro’s feeding tubes could be removed:
I agree that if she has enough brain function to do the things asked of her (and I would have to see proof) then she is alive and cannot have her feeding tube disconnected.That would be euthanasia under the guidelines issued by his late holiness John Paul II. Under his ruling, a person could leave a living wii stating that they do not wish to be kept alive by extraordanary means, and this is not suicide. A doctor can choose not to begin extraordinay means of life support, and this is not euthanasia.But no-one can make the decision after the fact for the patient, and no doctor can refuse Ordinary medical treatment, THAT is euthanasia. Under that ruling as well, the patient is alive if they have brain function, and the ruling on euthanasia applies. The soul does not leave untill the brain stops functioning.
Vatican denies it’s trying to redefine death
The Vatican has caused a stir by appearing to want to redefine death and then denying any such thing. If where there’s smoke, there’s fire, we haven’t heard the end of this yet.
It all started with a front-page article in the Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano challenging the widely-accepted concept that brain death — the irreversible end of all brain activity — is the right standard for determining that someone has died. The article argued that doctors developed that standard 40 years ago to enable them to harvest organs for transplantation. The article by Lucetta Scaraffia, an Italian history professor and bioethicist, argued:
“The scientific justification of (the brain death standard) rests on a peculiar definition of the nervous system that is now being questioned by new research, which casts doubt on the fact that brain death leads to the disintegration of the body … The idea that the human person ceases to exist when the brain no longer functions, while the body is kept alive thanks to artificial respiration, implies an identification of the person with brain activity alone. This contradicts the concept of the person according to Catholic doctrine and thus contradicts the directives of the Church in the case of patients in a persistent coma.”
The Vatican accepts organ transplantation and the brain death standard, which is widely used in Catholic hospitals. Declaring the brain death criterion un-Catholic would mean those hospitals would have to revert to the cardiac death standard alone. But that leaves a much smaller window for removing viable organs and would make one kind of transplantation — heart transplants — all but impossible. As it is, there is already such a shortage of organs for transplantation that scandalous black markets for them exist and some experts want to see organs sold like commodities on an open market.
The Vatican has not changed its view on brain death despite holding two scientific conferences (in 2005 and 2006) to discuss it, but there are dissenters among Catholic bioethicists like Scaraffia who want to keep the debate going. She used the 40th anniversary of the pioneering Harvard Report that advocated the brain death standard to call for a reassessment.
Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican’s chief spokesman, got plenty of calls asking whether this was a change in the Church’s position. “This is not a Vatican document,” he responded. “It is an article by a historian that takes some considerations into account but it is not part of Church teaching.”
End-of-life issues are some of the most difficult challengesin ethics and some bioethicists say people should choose their definition of death in advance to ensure they don’t leave the moral quandary to others.
To Mathilda — In many ways the image you evoke of a more holistic way of dying, naturally and at home, without having to breathe your last breath while hooked up to multiple machines, is very heartening. Certainly there are now far too many cases today where defining the point of death, or even failing to allow death to happen when it naturally would occur because of the use (and misuse) of medical technologies.
However, in those past times, identifying the point of death was still a very problematic issue. Before the early 20th century, the great fear was of being buried prematurely, ie. while still alive. People in their wills often specified that a device such as a bell with a pullcord be put next to the grave, with the pullcord extending into their coffin, to call for help if they found themselves waking up six feet under. Others would specify that their veins be opened before burial. Of course the widespread modern use of embalming now achieves much the same thing as opening veins.
These fears were apparently well founded, as there is evidence that when graveyards were occasionally dug up and moved, the workers found scratch marks on the inside lids of coffins, made by the fingernails of the not quite deceased occupant. In fact I believe that the original purpose of a ‘wake’ was to monitor the supposedly deceased, lying in her open coffin, 24 hours a day for a few days to make sure she was truly dead and did not wake, hence the name.
All this strongly indicates that identifying the point of death from the ‘last breath’ was, if anything, even more problematic than the current medical ethics issues the Vatican is trying to address.
Paris archdiocese restores medieval college as faith forum
One of the largest medieval buildings in Paris reopens this week as a forum for discussion about faith in the modern world after more than two centuries being used mostly as a fire station and police training centre. The Collège des Bernardins was founded in 1247 by the English Cistercian monk Stephen of Lexington as a residential college for the order’s monks. After the French Revolution, it was taken over by the city.
The Roman Catholic archdiocese of Paris bought the building and spent five years renovating it to house its theology school and host debates, conferences, art exhibitions and evenings of film and music. Its first major event will be a speech on faith and culture by Pope Benedict, who will address an audience of 700 personalities from the world of French culture on the first day of his Sept. 12-15 visit to France.
The college, whose name comes from its original designation as St. Bernard’s College, stands on the Left Bank just off the Boulevard Saint Germain. The five-year restoration highlighted the building’s simple Gothic architecture while adding modern comforts such as heating, air conditioning and WiFi (see video). The college aims “to serve mankind in all its dimensions — its emotions, its intelligence, its liberty, its relations and its faith”.
The city’s archbishop, Cardinal Andre Vingt-Trois, told journalists during a pre-opening media tour that the Catholic Church needed to promote discussion with modern society. “Our Christian faith, our Christian tradition and wisdom are today immersed in a pluri-religious and pluri-cultural society. Despite the generous and multiple forms of religion on offer, many of our contemporaries do not belong to a specific religion, or have no religion or belief at all.” The discussions will bring together Catholics and non-Catholics, believers and non-believers, to discuss issues including culture, economics, international development and Christian-Jewish relations. Another issue will be the effects of scientific progress on society and questions of bioethics, he said. “How will human identity — what it means to be a man or a woman — be respected and promoted? Will it be reduced to the roll of a tool for the well-being of a few?
“All these questions face us. We don’t all have the same answer. We don’t always have an answer. But we are all confronted with these questions and we cannot avoid them, unless we consider human history to be a fate that mankind cannot change. That is not our conviction.”
The college is the largest civil building in Paris dating from the Middle Ages. Only Notre Dame Cathedral and a few other major medieval churches are larger, said Hervé Baptiste, the Culture Ministry’s chief architect for historical monuments. Thanks to its monument status, the Culture Ministry, Paris City Hall and the Ile-de-France region around Paris contributed 14.5 million euros of the college’s 50-million-euro renovation bill. The rest was financed by contributions from companies and individuals as well as bank loans guaranteed by rents the archdiocese receives from its real estate holdings in the French capital.
Excellent initiative. I’m Catholic and Parisian and I very much look forward to visiting this place of dialogue and respect.
Dutch play probes “mercy killing” as euthanasia deaths fall
“The Good Death,” a play about euthanasia, has brought the issue of “mercy killing” to Dutch theatres at a time when such deaths are falling. They dropped to 2,325, or 1.7 percent of all deaths in 2005, from 2.6 percent in 2001. Playing to packed houses throughout the Netherlands, which legalised euthanasia in 2002, the play shows the law has not removed the moral dilemma for many involved.
In fact, part of the reason for the drop in euthanasia deaths could be that agonised doctors are opting to give patients heavy sedation until they die, rather than putting an end to their lives. Even some patients who have asked for euthanasia are given continuous deep sedation instead. This feature by our Netherlands chief correspondent Emma Thomasson looks at the issues involved.
This raises the question of whether deep sedation, while being presented as palliative care that is ethically acceptable for many faiths, is not in fact “euthanasia lite.” Or at least whether it is being used as such. The British Medical Journal has suggested this in a report that prompted an editorial and a lively reader discussion. “Although the exact cause of this trend is unclear, there are indications that continuous deep sedation may in some cases be being used as a substitute for euthanasia,” a report in Science Daily said.
The fall in Dutch euthanasia deaths is sometimes cited by “death in dignity” campaigners in other European countries as a sign that legalisation is not a slippery slope towards the easy disposal of ailing patients. This suggests it might lead in another direction that could undermine the palliative care option often presented as the alternative to legalised euthanasia.
Where do you think the line should be drawn in end-of-life care?
I have lived in Holland and I know how what a progressive and positive place it is. Here they lead the world with their respect for the will of the individual. It is not without good reason that Dutch children are reportedly the happiest in Europe. The world should be following their example on their euthanasia stance. I respect them tremendously.
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