Posted on 10/09/2006 7:25:37 PM PDT by Coleus
ST. LOUIS, October 6, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – For the first time, a Catholic bishop in the US has come out with a strong statement clarifying the Church’s teaching on the practice of donating, or sometimes selling, human ova for medical research. Archbishop Raymond Burke of St. Louis, a strong advocate for life and family, has published a pastoral letter in which he says unequivocally that the removal of ova for artificial reproduction, including cloning, is a grave moral evil.
Referring to an upcoming ballot initiative to amend the state constitution, Archbishop Burke warned that the push to create cloned human beings for medical research not only necessarily takes the lives of innocent human beings, but also exploits women in the process. He wrote, “Human cloning requires the harvesting of eggs from women who are exploited to accomplish the purposes of its proponents. As Christians, we must address the immorality of such exploitation.” “The woman who subjects herself to the harvesting of her eggs for human cloning participates in a grave moral evil, the artificial generation of human life.” Burke said.
That the Catholic Church unequivocally condemns all artificial means of reproduction, as well as abortion and contraception, is one of her best-kept secrets. Pro-life advocates have long struggled to bring to light the fact that the source of much of the so-called “stem cell controversy” is that IVF and its related procedures are themselves violations of human dignity. Burke tells his readers that the ballot measure, called Amendment 2, contains deceptive language and although it is presented as a ban on cloning, it actually protects the practice.
“In fact,” says Burke, “it gives the constitutional right to clone human beings.” “Women will be asked to cooperate in the process without the necessary explanation of the moral implications of their cooperation.” Burke says plainly: “The natural moral law prohibits any woman from cooperating in the act of human cloning.”
He warns that the process involved in creating human clones makes not only the clone but the woman into a “commodity” to be bartered in the scientific world. Calling the process “dehumanizing,” Burke says, “The great gift of fertility in a woman, the natural production of the human egg for reproduction, now becomes an object for manipulation by those who promote human cloning.” "A woman’s cooperation in the twin evils of human cloning and the destruction of human embryos for the sake of the harvesting of stem cells is never justified.”
The Archbishop calls on his readers to consider “the grave moral crisis for our state and nation, which Amendment 2 represents, please give reflection to the moral and physical exploitation of women involved in human cloning for embryonic stem-cell research.”
Read the full text of Archbishop Burke’s letter:
http://www.stlouisreview.com/abpcolumn.php?abpid=11552
Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Barely Studied Risks of Egg-Donation Come Under Scrutiny
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2006/aug/06081106.html
Newborns? Mentally retarded? ALzheimers? Below a certain IQ?
THE SOUL IS THE LIFE!
THE SOUL IS THE LIFE!
THE SOUL IS THE LIFE!
(Sorry, I just to shout it out.)
OK, I'm game. Give me another reason for deciding that at some point in a persons life, they aren't human?
I wonder if your friend has changed that opinion; I guess there are a lot of zombies walking around now?
Exactly so. Or perhaps those wicked people who believe in God (according to Richard Dawkins...).
Exactly so. Or perhaps those wicked people who believe in God (according to Richard Dawkins... or other evolutionists, judging by the names I've seen believers called.)
amen...amen...amen...amen...
Still begging the question. Anytime a person is a person, they're human. The question is when they become a person.
You have captured the unavoidable logic of that position.
As a libertarian, to what public agency would you give the authority to create and define those two classes? Who would determine the criteria? Would we get to vote on it, or just leave it in the hands of an oligarchy of philosopher-princes?
I'm saying that brain function is the tie between body and soul. When the brain does not function, the soul is no longer with the body.
A body can be kept alive with machines, for an extended time after there is no brain activity. Very few -- including many generally opposed to euthanasia, as I've found out discussing this here -- would object to the body being allowed to die.
I am unsure, however, at what level of brain function is needed for the soul to be attached.
So we're agreed. The soul is the life. Not the body.
I think I've pretty much stated that brain activity should be the baseline for personhood.
So how do you know that? On what basis did you come to that conclusion? Scripture? Medical science? Opinion? And what difference is there between a *person* and a *human*?
Still, the other question remains: What other reason could there be for deciding that at some point in a human beings life they are not a person, or human, or whatever it is that the rest of us are called if it's not for some nefarious purpose?
What if a human being, otherwise healthy and living, had no measurable brain function, but it was 99% certain that, given nutrition and very simple care, he or she would have measurable brain function in 6 weeks or so, with dramatic improvement expected thereafter, based on a study of a huge number of similar cases?
I can't speak for little jeremiah, but we're referring here to an embodied soul or, if you will, an ensouled body. The point being that if the entity you're looking at is alive, that is the same as saying it is ensouled. Alive = ensouled.
The body is the clothes, or vehicle, the soul is the animating spiritual spark, eternally existant and created by God. What we call "life" is the energy from the soul. But as long as the soul is residing in the vehicle, God alone has the right to remove the soul. Other than capital punishment or a just war.
That said, there was something that struck me as wrong with that. What if a woman, going to a post-viability abortion is in a car wreck? She is taken to an ER, where the doctors, not knowing her plans, perform an emergency C-section. At the exact moment, the woman was scheduled to have an abortion, there is a living baby -- a baby, who if someone killed it at that moment, would be considered a victim of murder. Certainly, therefore, a viable fetus is a person. Therefore certainly a soul is associated with a baby, by that point.
The problem for me with associating as soul at the moment of conception is several fold. For one thing about thirty percent of conceptions don't even make it to implantation, for natural reasons. Toss in the number of natural miscarriages and we're somewhere around fifty percent. So, if a soul is joined with body at conception, the natural result is -- leaving out intentional abortion and reincarnation (which Judaism doesn't rule out, but that's for another time) -- that half the souls that make it Earth don't make it out of the mother's body.
If this is the way God intended it, it would strike me as rather wasteful. I don't believe in a wasteful God. (Yeah, it's opinion, but still...)
It struck me that the course of the soul in the afterlife is driven by the freely chosen actions of the body on Earth. Those actions can only occur, when there is a brain. Therefore brain activity is the absolute earliest point that there could be a soul associated with the brain.
(I've also considered that the soul is not a something directly sent by God to a body, but is an emergent property of mental activity. I makes a certain sense in that we are created in God's image and God did not have his spirit given to him by another.)
So yes, that's my opinion, as I've reasoned things out. It's stricter than my religious upbringing, not as strict as yours.
You are right that I've made a complete botch of human and person. I've had to stop and think about that. Human, should refer to the species, Homo sapiens. You are correct that a zygote is human.
Personhood, however, would be something else. Let's assume that we met up with another species of intelligence and that they, too, had a concept of God. Or, at least, they clearly had some divine spark in them. We would, I think, consider them to be persons. Not human -- not Homo sap -- but people none the less.
Therefore, I would say that it is our body that makes us human. It is our soul that makes us a person. That would be further indicated by the fact that we can remove a part of the body and transplant it into another and have that organ work, despite different genetic codes. But that transplanted organ is clearly human (adjectively, at least).
In any case, that's the way I think about it... As for what society thinks, that's going to be a tough consensus.
I will note this; if I were atheist, I'd be more likely to be pro-life. After all, if we do not have souls, then our entire identity is in our body.
As I noted above, the rate of conception to brain activity is far less than 99%.
That said, when I referred to brain death, I meant no brain activity, no blood flow, no spontaneous breathing -- the legal definition of brain death. Under those conditions, the brain is not going to start working. Period.
With that... I'm probably not going to be able to get back on FReep for a few days and I'll likely not be heading back over this stuff.... (Translation: I meant to be working on rewriting a novel for the past hour and now I'm kicking myself.) So the last word is yours, if you want it.
You're most welcome.
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