Embryonic stem cell warfare.

Two newspaper columns which appeared around the middle of May 2002 brought out the sharp divisions over the government's human reproduction bill.

Jeffrey Simpson in the Globe & Mail described the bill as "promising." He quoted Dr. Mark Poznansky, president of the John P. Robarts Research Institute in London, as fearing that his institute's research might be put on hold pending the creation of a proposed "Assisted Human Reproduction Agency." Such an agency, Poznansky said, could become a huge barrier to good research; ethics boards already exist at research facilities, and one more approval procedure is unnecessary.

One of Poznansky's mottos is "Technology leapfrogs politics." Stem cell research is in its infancy, but it has the potential to unlock medical mysteries which could help repair tissues damaged by Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and other diseases. Medical researchers need access to stem cells, the most useful of which come from embryos and fetuses. So says Dr. Poznansky.

Access to embryos clashes with the views of those who believe that life begins at conception. Many of the embryos from which stem cells would be extracted would be discarded. Discarding them without taking advantage of their possible uses, Poznansky says, would be a tragedy. Defenders of life would reply that ending any human life, including that of an embryo, is a tragedy as well as a sin. "We can expect," says Simpson, "the argument that stem cell research is murder." He is wrong there: adult stem cells, not derived from embryos, do not cause the same ethical problems, and up till now have actually proved far more useful than embryonic stem cells.

Andrew Coyne 

In contrast, Andrew Coyne had a column in the National Post for May 13, headed "The middle ground is in the middle." He began by saying that Health Minister Anne McLellan must have been pleased at the way her reproductive technology bill was received by the press. Readers of the Globe & Mail were informed that a provision in the bill allowing researchers to harvest human embryos for stem cells-killing them in the process, a fact that might be expected to be the subject of some controversy-was "a Canadian compromise." The Toronto Star agreed, saying "it struck a careful balance between the life-saving possibilities of stem-cell research and the need to protect the sanctity of human life." The National Post coverage, Coyne said, sounded a similar note. He himself did not agree.

The notion of stripping the unborn child for parts, he observed, "strikes me as sufficiently novel that it seems odd it should already be sanctified as a compromise," or as the Minister herself called it, "a middle-of-the road approach." Between the one extreme of insisting that human beings are not mere surplus tissue for the use of others, and the other of allowing them to be raised and killed on farms, the bill may indeed be a sort of compromise. But that is only a statement of how flexible words like "extreme" and "compromise" can be. The plain fact is that the unborn child has no protection in law in Canada. It had none before this bill, and it will have even less after it has been passed into law.

Anne McLellan

The Minister pointed out that "surplus" embryos are already being destroyed. "Do you know what happens to them?" she asked sweetly. "They go in the garbage. So the donor can choose to have them thrown out.. .or they can also choose to let those surplus embryos be used for the purposes of medical research." How absurd, Coyne commented, it would be just to throw all those embryos out with today's trash. The compromise position is to throw them out later.

The Globe, in fact, objected to the Minister's desire to ban therapeutic cloning involving the creation of embryos for research purposes. As an editorial explained, therapeutic cloning is unacceptable only to those who don't recognize that a days-old human embryo is only potentially human. It hasn't even the hint of a nervous system. It has no consciousness. It is a group of undifferentiated cells.

Coyne points out that if what distinguishes such a "potentially human creature" is the possession of a nervous system or consciousness, as it has in the later stages of fetal development, then the presence of such features should prohibit discarding a fetus at our will. But that can't be right, for that means that the fetus has some legal rights, or at least the right not to be killed. And that, as we know, he added mockingly, is an "extreme position." How do we know this? Because we are told so endlessly from the Prime Minister on down. The status quo, in which there are no restrictions on abortion has somehow been defined as the moderate middle ground.

Meanwhile, a poll in November 2001, showed that just 32 percent agree that abortion should be "legal under any circumstances". Which is to say, that roughly two-thirds of Canadians believe that there should be some restrictions on it. On abortion as it turns out, the middle ground is actually in the middle.

David Dooley is professor emeritus of St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, and associate editor of Catholic Insight.