Plundering the dead: harvesting the unborn.

Is it not time to stop regarding the dead body as anything but something to dispose of as quickly--and yes, as usefully--as possible? What is it that attracts some people to the dead body and makes them morbidly regard it as an object of reverence?

These are the words of B. N. Catchpole, emeritus professor of surgery at the University of Western Australia, in a letter to an Australian national newspaper last year. Professor Catchpole apparently believes it consistent with his vocation to mock the profound disturbance some bereaved people feel at the bodies of their loved ones being ransacked for workable organs. A generation ago this would have provoked calls for his expulsion from the medical profession. Today his opinion seems unremarkable.

Professor Catchpole's words returned to my mind lately as the Australian Parliament debated legislation--almost certain to pass eventually--that will permit medical stem-cell research on surplus human embryos from the nation's in vitro fertilization (IVF) programs. In the United States, such research is already well under way with private funding, though President George W. Bush has strictly limited support from the federal government. Australia's proposed law would permit research only on embryos already created for IVF, but it would be extraordinary if this limit proved permanent. Already the various state governments--each hoping to attract the lucrative research industry to its part of the country--are declaring that they will keep up pressure for a more liberal regime. I'm sure we will see the day when embryos are created specifically for such research. After all, only a most thoughtless cruelty would dismiss out of hand research that promises cures for Alzheimer's, diabetes, Parkinson's, and various types of spinal injury. Who wants to be the one to tell Christopher Reeve he will never walk again?

While the argument for such research moves every human heart, its simplicity may be an illusion. For the problem is not just a matter of totting up the costs and benefits for health and welfare. Also at stake here are the respect--and better, the tenderness--with which we treat human life in its totality, not simply during its halcyon days when we wax fat, but in the lonely vulnerability of our beginnings and our endings.

I recently read a newspaper report in which opposition to voluntary euthanasia was styled "a small bump on the path of human progress." We should be frightened that this sort of putdown is fast becoming conventional wisdom--not to mention a matter of law in the Netherlands. Such seeming practicality is apparently oblivious to one of life's more significant aspects: that we have rich attachments to other human beings which go beyond securing for them the tangible benefits of food, shelter, and healthy survival. In a word, it has to do with love.

Respect for the living and the dead is an essential expression of such love. It is exemplified not only in care for helpless infants, but after life is over, in funeral services, monuments, and the obligation to remember our predecessors' lives truthfully. The utilitarian eagerness to be rid of what is no longer "useful"--to dispatch the deceased without tenderness and ceremony--undermines any claim for having loved the departed in the first place.

Similarly, we cannot treat the human embryo as just a resource for exploitation--no matter how worthy the cause--without cheapening it and ourselves, and in so doing, coarsening our sense of the miracle of human life. Of course, some will say that it doesn't matter how we treat embryos in their first few weeks of existence, for they are just like so much jelly in the bottom of a test tube. Still that jelly is also rightly describable as the origin of a new human life. And under that description, a different, more significant attitude can be discerned. For how we treat one another does matter in human life and makes for its depth or its shallowness, its seriousness or its frivolousness. This includes how we honor the ways in which we are created. While acknowledging that there is no sharp point at which a "human being" or a "person" suddenly begins, we must still ensure that neither embryos nor the dying are viewed as factory fodder.

The high-minded, official rationale for boundless medical research--that it will find cures for disease and damage--is not what it appears if that research is conducted in the wrong spirit. Professor Catchpole professes humanitarian concern for those "people with diseased hearts or kidneys ... dying because relatives of the dead think their bodies should be allowed to rot without interference." Yet there is a legitimate tension between humanitarian concern and viewing the human body as an organ farm, for the latter attitude may come to include the very patients supposed to benefit from it. And this will certainly happen if human beings are deemed to have value only in so far as they are healthy and useful. Then the hectic rush to cure disease--with its glittering prize of virtual immortality--will be a double-edged sword for sure. For while its spokesmen may express compassionate concern, their actions will imply that it is only the strong and the useful who are of real importance. The very shrillness of some in the research lobby, like Catchpole, makes one question whether their lofty humanitarian sentiments aren't just rhetorical bluster. What really irks Catchpole about those pesky relatives who won't give up their "barbaric and primitive, not to say selfish" attachment to the bodies of the dead, is not the needs of patients with diseased hearts and kidneys, but the obstacles and delays thrown in the path of medical progress. And from this relentlessly practical point of view, love and grief themselves are, at bottom, a waste of energy.

Andrew Gleeson is a lecturer in philosophy at the Australian Catholic University.