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Collateral Damage 1: Embryos and Stem Cell Research

by Richard Dawkins

George Bush has just vetoed a bill, approved by both Houses of Congress, which would have allowed federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. Apparently the President’s ethical philosophy places a higher value on American embryos than on Iraqi or Lebanese men, women and children. Don’t misunderstand ‘embryos’, by the way. We are not talking miniature babies here. The ‘embryos’ used for stem cell research are no bigger than a pinhead, and completely lacking in sentience of any kind. The illogical and hypocritical inconsistency between Bush’s stance on embryonic stem cell research on the one hand, and on slaughtered and maimed Iraqis and Lebanese on the other, is the subject of this article. It is an inconsistency that you could find only in a mind massively infected with the disease of religion.

It is possible to justify civilian casualties of war, if you can make a good ‘lesser of two evils’ case. In Donald Rumsfeld’s charming phraseology, ‘stuff happens’: civilian deaths are ‘collateral damage.’ In this article, I shall compare two kinds of collateral damage – civilians as casualties of war, and embryos as casualties of stem cell research – demonstrating the hypocrisy of those who happily condone the first while vetoing the second. It is worse than hypocrisy, because of the grotesque inequality in suffering caused by the two cases.

If there is a moral justification for collateral damage, it is inherent in the word collateral. To justify collateral damage, you must make a case that it really is an unavoidable by-product of the attainment of a greater good. And the magnitude of that greater good must exceed the magnitude of the collateral damage by some appreciable margin. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 caused enormous damage – death, burns, injury and long-term radiation effects – to innocent Japanese non-combatants. The justification offered is that it accelerated the ending of the war, thereby saving more lives than were lost. That, of course, raises the usual questions. Why the second bomb on Nagasaki? Why drop the bomb on a city at all, instead of staging a spectacular demonstration in an unpopulated area? But I leave such questions to one side. The general principle is that collateral damage is justifiable only by setting it off against a greater good. The collateral damage must be the lesser of evils, otherwise it is morally indefensible.

Those who object to embryonic stem cell research mostly do so on the grounds that embryos die in the process. Embryo deaths are collateral damage, in the service of medical research. The research itself is almost universally agreed to be a good thing. The question, then, is whether the medical benefits of embryonic stem cell research outweigh the collateral damage of embryo deaths. In our efforts to calibrate these pluses and minuses, we shall be helped by a comparison with the equivalent pluses and minuses of the wars now raging in Iraq and Lebanon. How much pain, misery and bereavement is caused by the deaths of embryos in stem cell laboratories? Compare it with the pain, misery and bereavement caused by Lebanese and Iraqi deaths and injuries – and of course American, British and Israeli deaths and injuries too. Moving to the positive sides of the respective balances, how do the benefits of the American invasion of Iraq, or the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon, compare with the medical benefits of embryonic stem cell research?

Of the four quantities we need to assess, it would be macabre and unnecessary to detail the collateral damage to life and limb in Iraq and Lebanon. Nobody denies that it is appalling, and of immense scale. It had better be balanced by correspondingly huge benefits, and it is by no means agreed that this is the case. In Iraq, the only benefit of the American invasion would seem to be the departure of Saddam Hussein. This is no small benefit, but it is not widely agreed that it outweighs the demolition of the country’s infrastructure, loss of water and electricity supplies, loss of communications, and loss of freedom to travel safely, let alone that it outweighs the current (and to many of us predictable) downward spiral into sectarian civil war between Sunni and Shia Muslims. Saddam Hussein’s regime, for all its barbaric cruelty, might arguably be better, for the majority of Iraqis, than what has now been put in its place.

In Lebanon, everyone is appalled by the slaughter going on at this very moment as I write. In the entire world, only the governments of Israel and the United States (and of course Britain trotting loyally to heel) defend the Israeli action, and they do so on the grounds that, unpleasant as it is in the short term, it will be worth it in the long term if it succeeds in getting rid of Hezbollah. Innocent Lebanese civilians die as collateral damage, unfortunate side effects of the drive to destroy Hezbollah. Whether that drive will succeed is far from widely agreed. Even if it does succeed, many knowledgeable observers forecast that the subsequent backlash throughout the Arab world will wipe out any advantages there may be: exactly as happened in Iraq. The bottom line of the balance sheet for these two wars must be that the collateral damage is universally agreed to be dreadful, while the alleged benefits are at best disputed.

How do those costs and benefits stack up against the corresponding ones for embryonic stem cell research? On the benefit side, there is nearly 100% agreement that the medical benefits of embryonic stem cell research are potentially huge. Not even the most ardent opponents can deny this with any conviction. Even among those who, on moral grounds, prefer the use of adult stem cells, or stem cells obtained from the umbilical cord blood, no knowledgeable opponent denies that, from a purely scientific point of view, there are many purposes for which embryonic stem cells are preferable if not indispensable.

Unlike the disputed (that’s putting it mildly) advantages of invading Iraq and bombarding Lebanese villages, the positive side of embryonic stem cell research, then, is overwhelmingly agreed. How about the negative side? How does the collateral damage in embryo deaths stack up against the collateral damage in Iraq and Lebanon? Is there, indeed, a negative side at all? Is it clear that killing a small cluster of embryonic cells is morally worse than, say, boiling a lobster? The lobster has a nervous system and probably feels pain. The embryonic cells certainly don’t feel anything at all.

Let’s look at the negative side of killing embryos more carefully: the putative collateral damage. Collateral it certainly is, but is it damage? Damage to whom? Who suffers? Who feels bereaved? Who feels frightened? Note again that we are not talking about killing foetuses with little hands and feet, little miniature babies who open their mouths in the womb and even seem to cry. The embryos that are destroyed in stem cell research are blastocysts consisting of no more than 150 cells. Such a tiny entity, almost too small for us to see, has no nervous system of any kind. Philosophers tell us how difficult it is to know whether a creature such as a lobster feels pain. But it has a substantial nervous system, and many of us feel we should give it the benefit of the doubt – especially as there doesn’t seem to be much doubt. But of one thing we can be pretty sure: an entity that lacks a nervous system altogether cannot feel pain. The embryo that dies as collateral damage during stem cell research no more suffers than your hair does when it is cut; the embryo feels no more fear than your toenails do at the menacing approach of the scissors.

The moral objection to killing blastocysts, then, cannot be based on suffering. So, what is it based on? Religion, almost always. It is partly a mystical reverence for humanness, as though all cells of Homo sapiens are suffused with a divine essence, some sort of sacred juice called Homsap, which no other species possesses.* Such a notion is fundamentally un-evolutionary. At what point in the line of descent from the common ancestor we share with chimpanzees, was the divine essence first injected? If you set aside what it will eventually grow into, there is no important difference between a human blastocyst and that of any other mammal. So we are left with the fact that human blastocysts, which can feel nothing now, have the future potential eventually to develop into beings that are capable of human suffering, human loves, hates and fears, human consciousness. It seems to me an inadequate basis for an ethical decision. Even if you disagree, you should surely at least consider the relative moral status of an Iraqi or Lebanese whose capacity to suffer is not just potential in the future, but here and now in the present.

If you ask me whether I care more about the destruction of a blastocyst, which theoretically has the potential to develop into a conscious human being, or the painful killing of an adult cow in an abattoir which has already reached its full potential, my answer is not in doubt. If I see a terrified cow about to have its throat cut by a Jewish or Muslim slaughterman who insists, purely for religious reasons, that it must be fully conscious when the knife hits, I want to intervene on its behalf. If I see a human blastocyst the size of a pinhead about to be flushed down the drain, do I want to intervene on its behalf? Oh come on, get real.

According to the moral philosopher John Harris, who has made a special study of such matters,

We now know that for every successful pregnancy which results in a live birth, many, perhaps as many as five, early embryos will be lost or ‘miscarry’ (although these are not perhaps miscarriages’ as the term is normally used, because this sort of very early embryo loss is almost always entirely unnoticed). Many of these embryos will be lost because of genetic abnormalities, but some would have been viable. How are we to think of the decision to have a child in the light of these facts? One obvious and inescapable conclusion is that God and/or nature has ordained that ‘spare’ embryos be produced for almost every pregnancy, and that most of these will have to die in order that a sibling embryo can come to birth. Thus the sacrifice of embryos seems to be an inescapable and inevitable part of the process of procreation. It may not be intentional sacrifice, and it may not attend every pregnancy, but the loss of many embryos is the inevitable consequence of the vast majority of (and perhaps all) pregnancies. For everyone who knows the facts, it is conscious, knowing, and therefore deliberate sacrifice; and for everyone, regardless of ‘guilty’ knowledge, it is part of the true description of what they do in having or attempting to have children.**

Large numbers of embryos, in other words, die as collateral damage in any case, side effects of normal, natural attempts to get pregnant.

In vitro fertilization, IVF, is a wonderful technique whereby couples that cannot conceive normally are helped to achieve their dream. The woman is stimulated by hormone injections to super-ovulate. As many as a dozen eggs are harvested from her ovaries under general anaesthetic. An attempt is made to fertilize all these eggs with her husband’s sperm, in a dish. Of those that are fertilized, two, or occasionally three, are chosen for insertion into the uterus. The remainder are either flushed down the drain, or used for research, or frozen for future possible use. Of the two or three that are implanted, the expectation is that no more than one will survive. Sometimes twins are born and very occasionally triplets. But doctors do not implant three conceptuses in the hope of making triplets. Quite the contrary. In the unlikely event that all three implant successfully and develop, normal practice is to kill at least one of them. A surplus is provided in the hope that one will survive. IVF doctors, in other words, do what nature (or God if that is how your mind works) does anyway: they budget extra embryos which are destined to die as collateral damage in the course of bringing one of their siblings to term.

Perhaps you still feel, on religious grounds, that there is an important distinction between God choosing to kill embryos, and humans making the choice. If that is how you feel, please at least give some attention to another distinction: the distinction between killing blastocysts as collateral damage, in medical research which will certainly achieve the saving of many lives, and killing innocent men, women and children, or blowing their limbs off, as collateral damage in a war which might just possibly achieve . . . what?

Of those conceptuses that IVF doctors freeze for possible future use, a very few are later implanted, often into a different woman. Some doctors are dubious about the practice, because they worry that freezing might damage the embryo. Nevertheless it is sometimes done, and a few ‘snowflake’ babies have been born. In announcing his veto of the bill allowing federal funding of stem cell research, Bush characteristically chose to make it a nauseating photo opportunity. He surrounded himself with ‘snowflake’ children, even taking one in his arms for the big climax to the photo-opp. Let us hope the resulting heart-warming photograph will comfort and console the bereaved in Iraq and Lebanon. Never mind that you have lost your limbs or your children: at least the fate of the world is in the hands of a man who is pro-life.
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* See ‘Homsap: Elixir of Holiness’, originally one of my Free Inquiry columns and reproduced at http://richarddawkins.net/mainPage.php?bodyPage=article_body.php&id=116

** John Harris (2002). The ethical use of human embryonic stem cells in research and therapy. In (Eds) Justine Burley & John Harris: A Companion to Genethics. Oxford: Blackwell.

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