EMBRYONIC STEM CELL RESEARCH: MORAL DILEMMA, NOT MORAL ABSOLUTE

Had I been born a decade earlier in my grandparents’ home in Poland, my “genetic inferiority” would have meant a swift one-way trip to the crematoria of Auschwitz. I cannot escape that conscious-rattling thought every time I ponder the bioethical paradoxes of how and when life should begin and end.

Can any honorable person be unequivocally pro-choice, if “pro-choice” comes to mean justifying disposal of human life as a function of “inconvenience”? Can any honorable person be unequivocally pro-euthanasia, if a subjective, pragmatic definition of “quality of life” comes to outweigh life’s intrinsic dignity?

“Unequivocally” is the operative word. Rarely do we leave room for equivocation when we engage in pietistic debate, the kind of debate that proposes simplistic yes-or-no answers to gut-wrenching ethical paradoxes. Equivocation does not mean moral compromise. It does mean striving to establish a delicate equilibrium among a number of moral principles, each one vying for primacy in the debate.

Which concern is more compelling: An expectant mother’s physical or emotional wellbeing? Or a fetus that will, if brought to term, be an autonomously viable being? Which concern is more compelling: The easing of a moribund patient’s transition to inevitable death? Or the preservation of life at any cost, a basic tenet of every religion’s ethos? Anyone who claims that he/she has the one magic-bullet answer to any of these paradoxes is not a moral paragon, just an arrogant demagogue or fool.

Classical Jewish teaching passionately resists the idea of laying down broadside, one-size-fits-all decisions on life-and-death dilemmas. It opts instead for weighing the merits of each case individually in the light of Biblical and Rabbinic wisdom, the unique details of the particular situation, and the measured judgment of scholarly and moral authority.

In rendering a decision in a particularly complex case involving abortion, one medieval rabbi stridently warned: “Let those who decide the law in future generations not cite our deliberations as precedent. Rather, let them do as we have: Judge only that which is before their eyes.” Judaism, thus, is not “pro-choice.” It is “pro-situational review.”

[This is precisely why traditional rabbinic ordination (including my own) grants the rabbi permission to engage in case-by-case Jewish legal/ethical review, not absolute judicial authority.]

The ethics of utilizing embryonic tissue for stem cell research certainly qualifies as an essentially insoluble paradox. Saying that the tissue would likely be discarded anyways may be a pragmatic justification, but it is not necessarily a moral one. Rather, here are some of the bioethical guideposts that classical Jewish thought puts forth, much of which was authored by rabbis who could well have been Jesus’ mentors or contemporaries (I will provide specific Biblical and Rabbinic citations, if you contact me):

1. Jewish law does not consider genetic tissue to be an embryo when outside the uterus, for it is not even part of a human being until implanted in a woman's womb.

2. During the first 40 days of gestation, zygotic tissue even when within a woman’s womb is not considered an embryo, but “as if it were simply water.”

3. According to Jewish law, the destruction of an embryo even after 40 days is not considered murder, as a person attains viability only once its head has egressed from the birth canal. It is, however, considered a grave moral, perhaps even criminal, offense, unless it can be justified for some life-sustaining purpose – akin to justifying the amputation of a limb to spare a person from death.

We could thus make a compelling case from Biblical and Rabbinic law to broadly sanction embryonic stem cell research as a means of using tissue that has not yet attained viability for life-sustaining purposes. Yet, our approach should not be overly broad. To do so might infer license to manipulate human tissue in ways that would obscure the line between sustaining life and capriciously, even ruthlessly, deeming one life more worthy than another. As in the cases of abortion and euthanasia, the prudent ethicist will strive to delicately balance a number of competing moral virtues and imperatives, to be beneficent and just, and certainly to do no harm.

This is the reality of ethical decision-making: No quick, surefire, once-and-for-all conclusions. The ambiguity of one Hebrew word toward the end of the first chapter of Genesis is worth noting. It can alternatively be read as “rule over the world” and “surrender to the world.” Our lives are best lived on the horns of that ambiguity. Sometimes acknowledging a paradox as a paradox is our only lifeline to sanity and basic humanity.