256 - From pro-life to anti-ethics

A. C. Grayling
From pro-life to anti-ethics

If the promise implicit in recent work on reprogramming adult skin cells into pluripotent stem cells is realised, the chief gain will be greater simplicity, safety and straightforwardness in stem cell research and its eventual therapeutic applications. That is welcome news. But press coverage has predictably focused on the claim that this approach avoids the ethical objections over the use of embryos, objections raised mainly by those who sympathise with the so-called “pro-life” agenda.

It is not often remarked that “pro-life” objections are themselves arguably unethical, nor that they are inconsistent with what the pro-lifers’ beliefs should make them infer from what happens elsewhere in nature.

To start with the first point: stem cell research is aimed at alleviating many diseases, including Parkinson’s disease, spinal cord injury, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hearing and vision loss, and muscular dystrophy. The suffering and disability that could be diminished in people who actually (as opposed to potentially) exist, with their relationships, responsibilities, hopes, jobs and interests in full flow, is enormous - and genuinely pro-life.

If the adult skin cell work proves to be a dead end, and it turns out that only embryonic stem cells will do, the need will return to challenge the objectors’ insistence that it is more ethical to privilege 30 cells in a blastocyst over the needs of ill, disabled or dying children and adults.


The blastocysts in question come from IVF procedures with the informed consent of donors, for whom they are surplus to requirements. It is not clear whether all objectors believe these blastocysts should not exist in the first place, which would entail opposition to fertility treatment for couples who profoundly desire children. But the thought that these endeavours, so positive in themselves, might have the additional benefit of leading to clinical applications, should strike unprejudiced minds as an obvious good.

Then add to this the fact that nature is remarkably profligate in reproductive terms. Of the billions of eggs laid by fish, only about 0.5 per cent hatch. Humans are not much less lavish. Every year hundreds of billions of spermatozoa die before reaching an ovum, and billions of ova are expelled unfertilised in menstrual cycles. More than half of fertilised ova do not result in pregnancy. An estimated quarter of all pregnancies spontaneously terminate before the sixth week; and, overall, about one in five pregnancies spontaneously terminate before 20 weeks.

And until the advent of modern medicine, which is the result of research and intervention (of which stem cell work is a continuation), stillbirths and infant mortality further dramatically reduced the number of conceptions that reached adulthood.

Objectors to embryonic stem cell research ignore this context, which is one reason why they can take the ethically perverse step of putting blastocysts higher up their scale of moral concerns than people suffering now. People are precious; the profligate cellular sources that sometimes result in people are not people.

In opposing on doctrinaire grounds medical advances aimed at aiding the suffering, objectors to embryonic stem cell research are being positively unethical. The argument against them is not that the good ends of stem cell research justify any means. Rather, it is that the good ends, the circumstances in which blastocysts become available, and the facts of nature jointly enter into a weighting of the interests at stake. To anyone without prior commitment to a view that makes small clusters of cells more important than people, it is perfectly obvious where the greater weight lies.