After McCarrick resigns, DC archdiocese praises abuse victims’ courage

St. Clare’s Home in Greenville County, South Carolina / Susan B. Anthony List

Washington D.C., Aug 12, 2021 / 10:01 am (CNA).
The bishop of Charleston on Wednesday blessed a new home for women experiencing a crisis pregnancy in South Carolina.St… […]

Denver Newsroom, Mar 18, 2021 / 05:04 pm (CNA).- New “models” of early human embryos that cannot grow into full human beings provoke ethical questions about whether they are human beings. One ethicist warns that research should be halted out of caution until more is known, because of the ethical dangers and temptations in the experiments.

 
“Scientists face the perennial temptation to depersonalize early human life, and to treat embryos as objects. Human beings are so sacred, that we must particularly reverence them in their origins, in the way they come into the world,” Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk, a National Catholic Bioethics Center staff ethicist with a background in medical research, told CNA March 18.
 
“Researchers should err on the side of caution, because it remains always and everywhere wrong to create young human beings in petri dishes or laboratory glassware,” he said. “Doing so indicates a disordered eagerness to manipulate early human life and a willingness to exploit our own human offspring at the earliest stages of their existence.”
 
Two different research teams have created human embryo-like entities by creating hollow balls of cells that resemble blastocysts, called blastoids. The blastocyst stage is normally about five to six days after conception, at which time the developing embryo has rapidly dividing cells, according to the Mayo Clinic.
 
“The recently-reported human blastoids are pieced together out of stem cells, and at this point, they appear to be very embryo-like, though the jury is still out on whether they could ever be fully functional or complete human embryos,” Pacholczyk said.
 
The models are different enough from naturally conceived embryos that they will never become a viable fetus or baby, but they are very close to functioning like the early stages of a human being, National Public Radio reports.
 
The research could contribute to understanding how a single cell grows into a fully formed human being, and could help develop treatment for genetic diseases and prevent birth defects, miscarriages, or infertility problems.
 
The exact nature and ethical status of the models themselves is unclear, some observers said.
 
Kirstin Matthews, a fellow in science and technology policy at Rice University, told NPR she was concerned about “growing these sort-of humans in a test tube and not even considering the fact that they are so close to being human.”
 
Pacholczyk was similarly concerned.
 
“One of the ethical questions around such experiments is whether researchers may actually be making a handicapped, but genuine, human embryo, a young human that is doomed to death as he or she grows because of various defects in the way they were originally constituted by researchers,” he said, comparing the experiments to creating a child with a serious defect that kills them at a young age.

“If it were true that researchers are producing ‘disabled’ human embryos, entities that genuinely partake of our human form and essence, this would involve serious moral objections.”
 
“Because we don’t know yet whether we are creating crippled embryos in this way, we should be careful, and not perform these experiments using human cells,” he said. “Rather they should be done exclusively in animals, including non-human primates, to help us figure out, with reasonable certainty, whether any human entities we might later make would be human creatures or not.”
 
Jun Wu, a molecular biologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, led one research team’s experimental model development, while Jose Polo, a developmental biologist at Monash University in Australia, led a different team.
 
Polo’s team created blastoid models from adult skin cells, while Wu’s team created models using a combination of induced-pluripotent stem cells from adult human cells and human embryonic stem cells. The use of human embryonic stem cells has drawn ethical scrutiny from critics, including Catholic critics, because the cells are derived from the destruction of human embryos.
 
Insoo Hyun, a bioethicist at Case Western Reserve University and Harvard University, told National Public Radio that the models are so close to being a human embryo that they raise “a very interesting question of, at what point does an embryo model become a real embryo.”
 
“This work is absolutely unnerving for many people because it really challenges our tidy categories of what life is and when life begins,” Hyun continued. “This is what I call the biological-metaphysical time machine.”
 
In Pacholczyk’s view, the experiments described extend a mindset accepting of in vitro fertilization. The Catholic Church has long said this “is never acceptable as a way to engender new human life.”

“Regrettably, developmental biologists, such as Jacob Hanna at the Weizmann Institute of Science, are rationalizing precisely this kind of embryo experimentation by saying that researchers have already been destructively studying early embryos from IVF clinics for so long that there shouldn’t be anything wrong with it,” the ethicist added.
 
“He is advocating a very disturbing idea, namely, that of growing embryos and/or embryo-like entities ‘until day 40 and then disposing of it’,” said Pacholczyk. “He proposes, ‘Instead of getting tissues from abortions, let’s take a blastocyst and grow it.’

Hyun, one of the embryo model researchers, agrees on the need for clear ethical guidelines. However, he supports revisions to an international guideline that allows embryonic human experimentation on embryos up to 14 days old. He wants more exceptions “case by case in an incremental fashion,” he told NPR.
 
There is “growing pressure” to eliminate the 14-day rule in order to grow embryos for longer periods, Pacholczyk told CNA.

“Those who originally set up the 14-day rule devised a clever stratagem to offer lip service to the moral status of the human embryo, while enabling serious human rights violations to proceed apace in the world of embryology,” he said. “The 14-day rule objectively demonstrates no more respect for vulnerable humanity than would a declaration by the National Institutes of Health that researchers will now be permitted to do lethal experimental research on newborns up to the age of 14 months. Whether 14-days, 14-months, or anywhere in between, such ‘rules’ remain contrivances to justify the most unethical kinds of science and to allow for the exploitation of our own vulnerable human offspring.”
 
The U.S. National Institutes of Health funds work on human embryo-like structures but must follow a federal provision called the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, which bars government funding for research that creates or destroys human embryos.
 
Some researchers are pushing for this amendment to be changed, including some who aim to create synthetic human embryos, Nature reported in January 2020.

Catholic authorities have consistently rejected destructive human embryo research. In May 2017, Pope Francis told a gathering of Huntington’s disease patients and their families, “we know that no ends, even noble in themselves, such as a predicted utility for science, for other human beings or for society, can justify the destruction of human embryos.”
 
The October 2020 issue of Ethics & Medics, a commentary published by the National Catholic Bioethics Center, also discusses the ethics of embryo models in an article by Kevin Wilger, a research engineer.

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Washington D.C., Oct 11, 2017 / 12:04 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- After the Trump administration announced a repeal of emissions standards, Catholic leaders warned it could hurt poor communities and thwart long-term efforts to fight climate change.

“Pope Francis’ encyclical, Laudato si’, calls us to action in caring for our common home. A national carbon standard is a critical step for the U.S. at this time,” Bishop Frank Dewane of Venice, chair of the U.S. bishops’ domestic justice and human development committee, stated Oct. 10 after the Environmental Protection Agency announced a planned repeal of the Clean Power Plan.
Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, announced the repeal on Monday.

The Clean Power Plan, finalized in 2015 under the Obama administration, set goals for states to reduce carbon emissions from the utility sector, ultimately aiming to cut emissions by 32 percent by 2030.

President Obama announced the plan in August 2015, citing the need to curb pollution amid climate change and to reduce domestic health concerns such as asthma rates.

“By some estimates, a fully implemented Clean Power Plan could have prevented: 2,700 to 6,600 premature deaths; 140,000 to 150,000 asthma attacks in children; and 2,700 to 2,800 hospital admissions,” the Catholic Climate Covenant, a national partnership that seeks to educate Catholics about Church teaching on the environment, said.

The plan was “an important step forward to protect the health of all people,” then-chair of the U.S. bishops’ domestic justice and human development committee, Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami, stated.

However, in February 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court halted the plan being put into effect. President Trump ordered a review of it with the possibility of rescinding the plan in his executive order on energy independence in March, and Bishop Dewane warned that the order “effectively dismantles the Clean Power Plan.”

Pruitt, in a March 30 letter to state governors, told them that in light of the Supreme Court’s stay on the plan, they did not have to abide by the goals and standards set by the plan.

“It is the policy of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that States have no obligation to spend resources to comply with a Rule that has been stayed by the Supreme Court of the United States,” Pruitt wrote. “The days of coercive federalism are over.”

On Monday, Pruitt announced the plan would be repealed, to the disappointment of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Catholic Climate Covenant.

The chief fault of Tuesday’s announcement was that there is no sufficient replacement plan, Catholic Climate Covenant said.

Furthermore, coming on the heels of the U.S. pulling out of the international Paris climate agreement, where participating countries pledged to cut pollution and contribute to the Green Climate Fund, the repeal “solidifies the already troubling approach of our nation in addressing climate change,” Bishop Dewane said.

Recent Popes along with bishops from all over the globe “have all accepted the reality of human-forced climate change,” Dan Misleh, executive director of the Catholic Climate Covenant, stated on Tuesday. “And we know that our burning of fossil fuels is among the biggest contributors to this moral dilemma.”

The Clean Power Plan offered “flexibility to allow states to meet carbon reduction targets in meaningful ways,” he said. “This repeal now throws all of these potential gains into question.”

Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical Laudato si’, on care for our common home, specifically called for policies to reduce carbon emissions, he added.

In paragraph 26 of the encyclical, Pope Francis warned that “some of the negative impacts of climate change … will continue to worsen if we continue with current models of production and consumption.”

“There is an urgent need to develop policies so that, in the next few years, the emission of carbon dioxide and other highly polluting gases can be drastically reduced, for example, substituting for fossil fuels and developing sources of renewable energy,” the encyclical stated.

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