Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [63]
Armed with the microscope, scientists could follow the development of the foetus more closely, and they saw that Aristotle’s forty- or ninety-day distinction, as well as his ideas on organ development and foetal movement, were entirely baseless. In 1827, scientists demonstrated the existence of the ovum and began to unravel the process of conception. It quickly became obvious that the process of development from conception to birth was continuous, so to save the soul of the unborn child, abortion simply had to be forbidden. By 1869, Pope Pius IX had declared abortion at any stage of pregnancy to be a mortal sin. By 1917, the Catholic standpoint was that anyone associated with the process of abortion – even for therapeutic purposes, where the mother’s life is at risk – faced excommunication.
Science has made the creation of life no less thorny an issue. In 1897, the Vatican had to issue a Papal Bull banning Catholics from attempting artificial insemination. Why? Because that year, Walter Heape of Cambridge University reported that the process had become routinely successful in dogs, horses, foxes and rabbits. In 1968, the march of reproductive technology, particularly the contraceptive pill, raised ‘new questions which the Church could not ignore’, Pope Paul VI declared. As a result, he mandated that there is an ‘inseparable connection, willed by God, and unable to be broken by man on his own initiative, between the two meanings of the conjugal act: the unitive meaning and the procreative meaning.’ The emerging reproductive technologies were not for use by Catholics.
It was an understandable edict. The problem the Church has is that human beings are disturbingly creative and pragmatic. As a species, we innovate, then happily assimilate the innovation into our normal lives – especially if it solves a pressing problem. And perhaps there is no area of human endeavour more pressing, and less likely to be held back by anything other than practical difficulties, than reproductive science.
Actually, IVF caught the Catholic Church somewhat unawares. At the time of Louise Brown’s birth, the Church had said nothing specific about the technology. It has since banned its members from using IVF, declaring it ‘morally unacceptable’. But the Pope might just as well have saved his breath. The Catholics – whether they be doctors, scientists or infertile couples – were never listening.
After a further Vatican pronouncement on the immorality of IVF in 1987, several European Catholic hospitals announced that they would defy the edict and continue with IVF. It was, one hospital said, ‘an infinitely precious human service’. Margaret Brooks, an Australian Catholic and the first woman to have a child born from a frozen embryo, told the New York Times that no one paid such pronouncements any attention. In 1985 a poll found that 68 per cent of American Catholics approved of artificial contraception. And in 2005 a study by the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University suggested that Catholics also strongly support IVF.
You can blame the secret anarchists for that. Every proposed innovation in this area has initially been rejected as foolhardy at best, or terrifyingly immoral at worst. But scientists have pressed on regardless – that’s what they do. And when science provides a way to satisfy a biological drive, externally imposed moral principles cannot stand in its way. Cardinal Renato Martino, head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, was asking for trouble when, in the face of IVF success, he repeated the papal declaration that ‘no one can be the arbiter of life except God himself’. Scientists are no respecters of popes or cardinals.
Craig Venter provides a good example of that. There would be no point in telling too much of Venter’s story here because he has done it so thrillingly in his autobiography, A Life Decoded. However, after all the historical examples, it would be looking a gift horse in the mouth to ignore this most anarchic – in the best possible