The manipulation of humanity.

In the mid-1970s, the Christian philosopher George Grant and his wife Sheila made a prophecy that was as virtuous as it was short-sighted. "(T)he public place we give abortion will be a central mark by which it can be known what rights will be given to the weak by our directors," the Grants wrote in an essay which concludes the book Technology and Justice. "Obviously, the justice of a society is well defined in terms of how it treats the weak. And there is nothing human which is weaker than the foetus," they affirmed.

The essay itself is one of the great clarion calls for protection of the unborn. It argued forcefully that the abortion-as-choice movement represented a tectonic shift not only in public attitudes, but in the underlying foundation of Western justice. What George and Sheila Grant could not foresee--who among us could have?--was that within a generation something even more vulnerable than the human foetus would indeed attract attention.

Having reaped the whirlwind of abortion rights in the last quarter of the 20th century, the technocrats whom George Grant identified ominously as "our directors" are moving on to human embryos for use in stem cell research. The harvesting of humanity continues. The one certainty is that it will not stop at this latest threshold.

The technocrats

Though the language of the stem cell research debate creaks with the cliches of scientific self-justification, its most important facet is the aura of imperative it contains. We must continue with conducting research on the earliest stages of human life because, well, because humanity demands it, society demands it, science demands it, morality demands it.

How would YOU feel, the question is invariably framed, if a loved one of yours were denied a treatment that might otherwise be available from the fruits of stem cell research? The expected answer is that you would feel distraught, frustrated, angry and, above all, morally wronged. It's a ploy lifted, with only minor variations, from the script of the abortion rights movement, which always asked: what if it were your daughter being forced to get an abortion from a back alley butcher? How would you feel then?

The fallacy in both cases is the assertion that deeply difficult human experiences clarify, rather than confuse, the moral nature of a given act. The truth is they almost never do. During direct, intense, emotional upheaval, people are much more likely to behave in ways they will later acknowledge as morally appalling.

Yet "our directors" now predicate not only malleable public policy, but foundational ideals of justice. On this, George and Sheila Grant were truly prophetic for they saw it as the inevitable outcome of eradicating Christian principle and belief from the rule of law. "The building (of our legal) system has depended on the struggle and courage of many, and was fundamentally founded on the Biblical assumption that human beings are the children of God," they wrote. "Mass murder comes when we forget what a human being is, and begin to regard people as accidental conglomerations of matter. A technological vision of man or woman as an object means that we can apply 'improvements' to them as objects with increasing efficiency." Or, as stem cell research demonstrates, we can make human beings the very conglomerations by which "improvements" are achieved with increasing efficiency in other human beings.

The Grants foresaw this process as aligned with political totalitarianism, with the Gulag and with Auschwitz. "Once we deny justice to any human life, then we are well on the road to the kind of thinking that impels a fascist dictatorship to the horrors of the death camp and the purge," they said.

The reality is that once we deny justice to any human life, the evils of fascism, death camps and purges themselves become obsolete, though not in the sense any sane person would desire. Rather, they are easily, almost naturally, replaced by the horrifying imperatives of the test tube and the petri dish and the laboratory work bench. They can be replaced by the human harvesters in white lab coats, bearing down on all of us with benevolent, all-seeing eyes.

Peter Stockland is the editor in chief of The Montreal Gazette and a regular columnist for Catholic Insight.