As with the gay marriage debate last year, Catholics were recently urged to contact their local MP to protest at proposed legislation that would allow mitochondrial donation to be used to create what were dubbed “three-parent babies”. As with gay marriage, the legislation was duly passed in the House of Commons by a thumping majority. We should not be surprised. Someone who took part in the lobbying of ministers over gay marriage said afterward that the experience had taught him that today’s politicians no longer live in the same moral universe as that inhabited by the leaders of Britain’s major religious institutions. They had no shared conceptual language.That must be even more true concerning medical research involving the modification of human eggs and embryos.
19 February 2015, The Tablet
The danger with appealing to science is that the argument is open to scientific refutation
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User Comments (1)
That the fertilized ovum is already a human being in essence means metaphysically that it will, in due course, become not a human being, but an ADULT human being. How anyone normally understands the term "human being" does not correctly define it unless, unlike Clifford Longley and Michael Sandel, one distinguishes the specific human identity from any of its stages of development. What the zygote grows up into, then, is not something essentially, but only incidentally different from what it started off as, and therefore only relatively speaking "something else", and absolutely speaking the SAME thing. Continuity of identity is also fundamentally what a thing adds up to as a whole, and only superficially involves distinguishing parts. Pope John-Paul II was referring to these fundamental metaphysico-scientific insights, according to which no individual biological entity ever changes from one species into another, which is the scientific basis for the Church's teaching on human identity starting at conception.