President Obama has followed through on one of his campaign promises and, as expected, his action has prompted swift and strongly critical response from the Baptist community.
Don KirklandOn March 9, the president lifted the prohibition on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.
In this edition of The Baptist Courier, four South Carolina Baptist leaders — Jim Austin, Rudy Gray, Hal Lane and Joe Mack — weigh in on what for years has been a volatile ethical issue.
The action by the president overturned the policy set by President Bush on Aug. 9, 2001, forbidding the use of federal funds to conduct research on embryonic stem cell lines created after that date.
The Bush policy itself provided only partial protection from the practice of embryonic stem cell destruction; it remained legal in the private sector of scientific research.
For Austin, the executive director-treasurer of the South Carolina Baptist Convention, the decision by President Obama on the stem cell research controversy reaches beyond the boundaries of that controversy alone. “This is a further indication,” he says, “that America is moving away from its faith and using the Bible as our guide for morality and ethics.”
Ben Mitchell is a professor of ethics at the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in the suburbs of Chicago and a consultant for the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. He is the author of an article carried by Baptist Press in Nashville entitled “Why the Stem Cell Policy is Wrong.”
Mitchell is against the policy outright, but he is particularly disturbed about the timing of Obama’s lifting of the ban enforced by the previous president. “All of this,” he writes, “comes at a time when alternatives to embryo-destructive research are reaching an all-time high.”
The Southern Baptist ethicist says that “more than 70 treatments or cures are available using adult stem cells that do not require the destruction of human embryos.”
Mitchell makes the point that the “attention-grabbing headlines” have been mostly about advances in the field of adult stem cell research, which is not a controversial issue.”
His conclusion on that matter: “To state it bluntly, embryonic stem cell research is obsolete.”
For Mitchell, the days of permitting scientific research “without careful attention to ethics are long gone.”
Science,” he writes, “must be informed by ethics.”
It cannot be reasonably denied that embryonic stem cell research has the potential to provide a variety of health benefits to people worldwide. Some conservatives support embryonic stem cell research. Nancy Reagan, whose late husband suffered for years from Alzheimer’s disease, issued a statement supporting President Obama’s executive order.
But it raises a question that is as old as the ages but no less relevant to the great moral questions of today: Do the ends always justify the means?
Science “informed by ethics” — and followers of Christ, informed by the word of God — would say: No, they do not.