President Obama silences Bioethics Council

June 30, 12:02 PMDC Catholic Living ExaminerDenise Hunnell, M.D.

Previous Next

Comment Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the DC Catholic Living Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

AP Photo/Haraz N. Ghanbari

The United States President’s Council on Bioethics was established by President Bush and set to expire in September. President Obama has hastened the demise of the council and dissolved it on June 18. No warning of this early dissolution was given to the members. They were simply given letters that unceremoniously declared their services were no longer required. According to the New York Times, the council was no longer useful because it was ““a philosophically leaning advisory group”. It is interesting that a group pulled together to sort through the morally complex landscape of bioethics is disbanded because it takes the time to explore the moral questions. President Obama objects to the introduction of discussion and debate of moral principles, considering this “unscientific”.

Peter Lawler, one of the dismissed members, offers a poignant reflection in the Weekly Standard.

On the issues of destroying embryos for medical research and abortion, for example, the president has made it clear that science has spoken authoritatively, and a consensus has developed. Those who disagree are to be personally respected, but there's no reason for their discredited, religious, ideological views to have any public influence.

The truth is that the Kass Council was full of experts who disagreed on what the science says about who we are. Robert George of Princeton spoke eloquently and profoundly about how the latest studies from the science of embryology proved that the embryo was a fully human being, no different in kind from, say, a teenager. An embryo is a who or not merely a what and already has everything it takes to be a unique and irreplaceable being with dignity, to be one of the men and women who are given equal protection by our Constitution. Other Council members--such perhaps as our nation's leading neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga--basically claimed that being human was all about having a brain and heart. So it's no brain, no heart, no problem when it comes to destroying embryonic beings in pursuit of medical progress. Still others, such as famous expert on everything Francis Fukuyama, thought that the evidence placed the embryo somewhere in between an animal completely undeserving of respect and a fully human being with rights and dignity. Kass himself claimed that we couldn't be certain, on the basis of science alone, about the human status of the embryo, but there was enough evidence to give that being the benefit of the doubt.

 

It is clear that when the moral discussion gets messy and does not fully support President Obama’s agenda, he uses his authority to shut down debate. Fortunately, freedom of speech still exists in this country. The debate may have ended in a White House sanctioned forum, but the debate will continue. Justice demands that the debate continue.