Several Catholic church leaders used their Easter addresses to criticise the Government’s flagship Embryology Bill and pressurise Gordon Brown into allowing his Catholic MPs a free vote when the Commons debates the Bill later this year.
Senior Labour MPs and peers accused the Catholic Church of trying to “dictate Government policy”. Scotland’s most senior Catholic, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, described the legislation as a “monstrous attack on human rights, human dignity and human life”, which would allow experiments of “Frankenstein proportions”. Lord Winston, a Labour peer and leading fertility expert accused him of lying and said that the Catholic Church risked destroying its probity.
The only reason that this issue has been turned into such a “thundering row” is the “inexplicable clumsiness” with which the Government is handling it, says The Daily Telegraph. When the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act was passed eighteen years ago by the last Conservative government, Tory MPs were allowed a free vote on the grounds that it was an issue of conscience. By initially resisting a free vote this time, Downing Street “succeeded in picking a wholly unnecessary fight”.
True, said The Guardian. And the irony is that, until now, the bill hadn’t sharply polarised opinion. All parties agreed that the 1990 Act needed updating because of medical advances. This bill has been subjected to years of pre-legislative scrutiny by both houses of parliament, as well as two months of recent debate in the House of Lords. Its passage has been marked by “serious attempts to solve difficult issues” and it should not now be caricatured as an attempt by industry giants to “trample dismissively through the flowerbeds of religious scruple and conscience in order to bring lucrative medical research to Britain.”
The most controversial aspect of the bill is the research involving animal-human hybrids, says Alasdair Palmer in The Sunday Telegraph. This “conjures up images of scientists creating real-life versions of centaurs and mermaids”, but in fact involves nothing of the kind. What is involved is taking a human skin cell and placing it inside an ovum, or egg, from – say – a cow from which all the genetic material has been removed. There it will be capable of issuing instructions for building every cell in the human body – a process that holds out the promise of a cure for a range of incurable, debilitating and fatal diseases. “Is anyone really going to claim that by scratching my hand and killing off some skin cells, I am destroying the potential for human life?”
It is the very idea of creating a hybrid embryo, which negates the concept of human uniqueness, that is so “abhorrent”, says Melanie Phillips in the Daily Mail. Experimenting on human embryos is bad enough, but creating an animal/human embryo “breaks an even deeper taboo”. Indeed, says Palmer, and at heart that’s what all the fuss is about. If all there is to life is a series of chemical reactions, where is the human spirit, the “spark of the divine”? “The answer is: nowhere.” The religiously inclined are worried about that answer, as am I. “But we can’t change the truth by trying to stop it being investigated, any more than the cardinals could make the sun go round the earth by imprisoning Galileo.” What we can do, however, is prevent the benefits, which may include cures for dozens of diseases, that could come from understanding the truth.