APPENDIX 51
Supplementary evidence from Reverend Christopher
Johnson
The measure of life is not its length or health.
There is too great an emphasis placed upon the importance of extending
and improving the life of the powerful and vocal at the expense
of the weak and silent. Humanism is sometimes assumed to be neutral.
Atheistic humanism leads to the inevitable conclusion that this
life is all-important and that we must do all we can to increase
its quality and extend its quantity at any cost. The ultimate
aim is of course impossible. We will all die. Humanism is not
a neutral position and brings bias into every decision.
If for example we consider God creates us then
we do not have the right to exploit our offspring as products
to extend or improve our own lives and every time we do so we
dehumanise ourselves. If this life is not all there is then how
we live is at least as important as how long we live. It is a
noble thing to bring healing and wholeness and to alleviate suffering
but we must never do so by devaluing any human life for this is
to devalue all human life. The prospect of a production line robotically
harvesting stem cells from human embryos must surely highlight
the horror of this exploitation.
The ethical ratchet is being mercilessly applied
to genetics. Every exceptional case is being exploited as the
grounds for moving the boundaries ever further in favour of the
parent and the patient and away from the unborn child. Current
abortion legislation has changed the perceptions of many about
life in the womb and this becomes the starting point for further
erosion of the protection for the embryo. It seems absurd that
some babies are killed while others are granted great help to
live. Why does society believe it is wrong to kill one and not
the other?
The ethical dilemmas that we are now discussing
are mainly a result of an incorrect underlying assumption that
human life begins at some point after fertilisation. The fact
that many zygotes die naturally does not legitimise our devaluing
the life that they hold. All humans die, many of them prematurely,
but each is still to be valued.
We cannot be sure when human life begins so
we must assume that it begins at fertilisation—this is the
only logical discontinuity between one life and the next.
More complex issues surround the testing and
selecting of gametes. This does not seem to me intrinsically unethical
although I cannot conceive that the technology can in practice
be developed without loss of many embryos. If it were serious
ethical decisions remain. These should not be left to those most
closely impacted by the decisions—the self-interested. Parliament
has an essential role in providing a legislative framework to
protect the vulnerable and prevent the thoughtless manipulation
of future generations according to the, probably mistaken, views
of our own.
June 2004
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