Maryland Lt. Gov Michael Steele, a Republican candidate for the
U.S. Senate, has apologized for likening embryonic stem cell
research to the Nazis' medical testing on Jews. Consider his
remarks:
Look, you, of all folks, know what happens when people decide
they want to experiment on human beings, when they want to take
your life and use it as a tool.
Okay, fine. He's violated the unwritten rule of polite
political discourse (the name of the rule escapes me): don't refer
to Hitler or the Nazis. But really, in this case, what's Steele's
offense? He supposedly trivialized "the pain and suffering of more
than 6 million Jews." That's his language from his apology
statement.
If anything, proponents of ESCR trivialize that pain
and suffering by refusing to learn from it. Not only did Nazis
treat humans as objects for medical experiments, but they targeted
the weakest among us. Today, ESCR would be right up their
alley.
In a superb column last year responding to similar comments
by James Dobson, Hunter Baker wrote,
Take a second look, though, and things take on a
different cast. If we broaden our inquiry just a little, we see
that what the Nazis were engaged in philosophically and
scientifically was not as fully distinguishable from our modern
dance with bioethics as we like to think.
For example, the Nazis did not confine themselves to
the extermination of Jews. They were also quite actively involved
with ridding the world of the retarded and mentally disabled. They
did not confine themselves to sterilization. In his powerful book
The Pillar of Fire, the great Jewish psychiatrist and
convert to Catholicism Karl Stern relates the story of a Lutheran
pastor Bodelschwingh who saves his colony of "feeble-minded,
epileptics, and idiots" from being killed only by protesting that
he must be killed, too. His fame was sufficient to prevent the
deaths. Stern indicates others were not so fortunate and that
during the war "the Nazis carried out the slaughter of all mental
patients."...
The point of this is simply to say that the Nazis
didn't hate the mentally retarded and epileptics the way they did
Jews. They thought they were building a better society and that if
a price had to be paid in terms of innocent human life to achieve
that, they were willing to pay it. That, too, was part of their
great moral disaster. Our current regime of bioethics shares that
same flaw. We are willing to destroy embryonic life in service of
hopeful improvements and pay scarce attention to whether it may be
a devil's bargain.
topics:
Catholicism, Law
