Every sperm is sacred

Despite the fact that he isn’t a Roman Catholic Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury and  all round bigot has been sounding off about embryo research in - where else - the Daily Mail.

So where is the big question for consciences? In most people’s understanding of what counts as moral behaviour, it’s taken for granted that you don’t use anyone else just for your own purposes – or even for other people’s purposes.

A human person, an individual body with feelings and thoughts, needs to be treated, as we sometimes say, as an end in itself, not a tool for someone else’s agenda.

So we condemn rape, torture and blackmail. We don’t allow experiments on people’s bodies or minds without their consent. And we don’t breed human individuals to create a pool of organs that could be transplanted to save the lives of others.

Here is where the problems begin. If a human embryo is produced by non-reproductive cloning, created as a research tool as proposed in the Bill, and then destroyed, is this in the same category as using someone’s body as an instrument for your purposes?

Put like this, the answer is clearly no. The compassionate and responsible scientists we are discussing here are far removed from the nightmares of experimentation on living and unwilling subjects that haunt our imaginations.

The difference is clear and no one should be trying to make debating points along these lines.

But if you put it another way and talk about creating an embryo that could in principle become a distinctive person – because it is already a distinctive organic unity – could this, in the long run, encourage a drift towards a new attitude to human life, an attitude that is more and more fuzzy about the absolute right of an individual not to be used for the purposes of another?

This is what worries some commentators about the practice of non-reproductive cloning.

Rowan, Rowan, Rowan - as my mother used to say - people are starving in Africa. People are dying in Myanmar. But you are worried about the fate of a collection of a few cells, because it ‘could in principle become a distinctive person’.

No embryo research is not the same as ‘rape and torture’ (I don’t know where blackmail fits into this unless someone has compromising material on the good Dr Williams). Because those crimes are committed against sentient beings. Which a collection of cells is not and never will be, unless it is implanted into someone’s uterus. And even then the odds are stacked against it.

On the other hand embryo research could save real live, actual human beings, who are here now and much loved. Yes it is, or should be taken for granted that we do not use other people for our purposes, but a collection of cells is not a person. Any more than a sperm or an ovum is. Become a Catholic, Dr Williams, you know you want to. And spare us all this nonsense.