NCR answered

Submitted by Consistent Ethic (not verified) on Fri, 12/12/2008 - 14:44.
All living organisms die, including human beings. The fact of death does not justify murder. Attempting to justify the murder of newly conceived human beings because many of them die is as absurd as justifying the murder of any other human being because he or she will surely die at some time.

Similarly, accidents happen, and the rare fusion of twins is one. The fact that fusion happens would not justify a project by scientists to make it happen any more than the chance that I might be hit by a car and lose a leg this afternoon justifies purposely hitting me with your car or cutting off my leg. The fact that an accident might happen to me, as death surely will, does not void my personhood. The fact that the accident of twin fusion might happen to fraternal twin embryos does not either prove or disprove the personhood of these embryos or of any human embryo.

It is true that the Church does not presume to judge when ensoulment happens and believes that this will always be a question beyond the scope of our human ability to know. Because the embryo, if it does not die, meet with an accident, or be hindered by human intervention, will surely develop into a fetus, an infant, a child, an adult and an old person, there is a strong probability that it is a person. As long as we can't prove it isn't (and we never will be able to do that), we have absolutely no right to harm it in any way, much less kill it.

Aren't the above obvious? We need to ask what utilitarian motives, including the pursuit of profit, would cause anyone, Christian (as the author says he is) or not, to try to render them unclear?

Finally, scientists like the one who cloned the sheep Dolly are abandoning embryonic stem cell research because alternatives that do not kill embryos (such as induced pluripotent stem cells) are more promising for medical research and treatment, as well as ethically far less problematic. Furthermore, medical pathologies are being treated right now with adult stem cells. No treatments at all have resulted from embryonic stem cell research that is ongoing, not only with the restricted number of stem cell lines eligible for federal funding under Bush administration guidelines but without restriction in US private labs and labs funded by foreign governments. Development of treatments from embryonic stem cells will always be complicated by the tumor-forming properties of embryonic cells. Graft/host rejection issues would present a strong impetus to the immoral cloning of embryos to be destroyed for medical use; excess embryos from in-vitro fertilization (also immoral, if for no other reason than its creation and abandonment of such embryos)are usable only for research, not actual treatments. I can imagine no possible reason for a scientist (or the incoming Presidential administration) to defend embryonic stem cell research or support it with my tax dollars other than the huge financial stake some parts of the medical and scientific community hold in this immoral and unneeded research.

NCR, you can do better. The Vatican has.