PBA350H: Pre-Born Human Rights Beyond Abortion

• Our focus is usually on abortion because it is the most common and most visible injustice when the right to life is denied to pre-born human beings.
• However, the pro-life position on pre-born human rights has ethical implications on other issues beyond abortion as well.
• If human rights are for all human beings, and they should start when the human being starts - which we know from science is at fertilization - what does that mean for stem cell research, assisted reproductive technologies, cloning?
• The ethical questions for these issues aren't complex once you understand that human rights are for all human beings, but still it helps to talk through them and get familiar and specific with a few things to be prepared to talk about these issues

First, let's start with this short explainer video about stem cells:

From what you saw in the video, what would the ethical concerns be with the use of stem cells?

• Answer: embryonic stem cells involves killing human embryos - young human beings - to harvest their cells
• The objective of trying to save other people's lives is good, but we can't kill to save
  • e.g. introduce the infant - what if we could harvest really powerful cells from newborn babies that could have potential life-saving medical treatments, but we'd need to kill newborn babies to harvest those cells? Would it be okay? If it's not okay to do that to newborn children, why would it be okay to do that to pre-born children?
• The distinction between embryonic and adult stem cells is important
  • Media coverage just often talks about “stem cells” without making the distinction
  • There's no ethical concern with adult stem cells - that's very valuable medicine and only helps people, it doesn't harm anyone
  • In fact, almost if not all of the successful medical treatments from stem cells have come from adult stem cells so far! Innovative, ground-breaking, life-saving and life-changing treatments, all from adult stem cells with no human beings killed. This is where the progress is, and there are no ethical problems with this
  • Researchers have not yet figured out how to control embryonic stem cells sufficiently to make use of them in actual medical treatments (NOTE: careful with this claim, and check it periodically to make sure it's still up to date)
• Also, helpful to know that umbilical cord blood stem cells are fine - these are adult stem cells from umbilical cord blood, not embryonic stem cells - no human beings are harmed in collecting this cord blood at childbirth

This video provides a 2min overview of different Assisted Reproductive Technologies:

Let's take three types of treatments for infertility

• Artificial Insemination
• In Vitro Fertilization
• non-ART: treatment of the underlyingcause of infertility to allow couples to conceive children naturally (e.g. https://www.naprotechnology.com/infertility.htm )

From a right to life perspective, which of these are ethical or unethical?

• NFP methods: no ethical problems
• Artificial insemination: No right to life ethical problems (no human beings are killed). People may raise other ethical questions in the realm of sexual ethics (e.g. whether or not it is appropriate to separate sex and procreation, or how semen is collected, etc.), but these are not right to life questions - no human beings are being killed
• In Vitro Fertilization: very “wasteful” with human life
  • First, sidenote: Do human beings created from IVF have human rights? Yes, of course
    • Are they human beings? Are human rights for all human beings are just some human beings?
    • Look around the room, can you tell who was conceived naturally and who was conceived through IVF?
    • Human rights are for all human beings, whether they were conceived in love or through assault, naturally or in a lab - the method of conception doesn't make a difference as to whether or not we have an individual human being, and all human beings deserve human rights
  • Ethical concerns about IVF…
    • Creating children we know are very likely to die in high numbers
    • Intentionally killing “unwanted extra” children for medical research or through selective reduction abortions
  • Fertilization is not always successful and more than one child is needed because not all will implant or survive
    • Many human beings are created, and “extra” unwanted human beings are killed for medical research, embryonic stem cells, etc
  • Implantation is not always successful
    • There is a high chance that many children will not implant in the uterine lining or will not survive the pregnancy
    • So, they attempt to implant many at once
    • Many children will not survive
    • Sometimes, more children survive than are “wanted”, so IVF is linked in practice with selective reduction abortions, e.g. to abort 1 or 2 children if 2 or 3 have implanted successfully
  • Could IVF be ethical if there was a 1-to-1 success rate?
    • In theory, it could be like artificial insemination, where all the right to life ethical questions are eliminated if there are never “extras”, never a ton of children with little to no chance of survival, never any selective reduction abortions
    • However, would it be ethical to kill the hundreds of thousands of children on the path to improving the success rate?
      • Trot Out the Toddler: Imagine there was a treatment that helped to cure a disability in toddlers, but it involved bringing 3 or 4 toddlers with the disability together, and typically all of them would die but one who might survive and sometimes be cured. If we did this thousands and thousands of times, we could eventually get better such that no toddlers would have to die and we could actually confidently cure all toddlers with this condition. Would it be ethical to kill thousands of toddlers on the way to developing a medical procedure that wouldn't have to kill anyone?

There's also a concern about treating human children as commodities to be mass produced like objects. Is that really an approach that respects the dignity of each individual person, the human rights of each individual human being?

re: commodity culture https://www.endthekilling.ca/blog/2017/05/08/embryo-ashes/

CCBR position piece https://www.endthekilling.ca/blog/2018/11/22/in-vitro-fertilization-a-human-rights-perspective/

Now that we've talked through IVF and embryonic stem cell research, there are a few things to say about cloning:

• Researchers have not figured out how to clone human beings yet, though cloning has been successful with other species
• However, if a human being was cloned, would that clone have human rights?
  • Yes, obviously - is the clone a human being? Are human rights for all human beings are just some human beings?
    • If you take a look at anyone sitting in the room here, would you be able to tell who was cloned and who was conceived from IVF or who was conceived naturally?
• Cloning has the same “wastefulness” problems as IVF - we have to kill a lot of human beings to get there
• Also, in practical, objectives like “therapeutic cloning” are not actually to simply clone new human beings to live, but rather to clone new human beings to die - to clone a person so that the clones embryonic cells can be harvested to treat the first person. Created human beings for the purpose of killing them and harvesting their cells is a clear human rights violation.

• (unfiltered) This is not about pseudoscientific conspiracy theories about vaccines causing autism or something, because the pro-life position is rooted in actual science.
• Rather, the question is whether or not it is ethical to use vaccines that have been derived from aborted fetal cell lines

• Ratzinger letter: https://www.immunize.org/talking-about-vaccines/vaticandocument.htm
• Cooperation with evil diagram