CNS STORY: Next pope will face bioethical challenges unforeseen 27 years ago

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FUTURE-BIOETHICS Apr-18-2005 (820 words) Backgrounder. With photo. xxxn

Next pope will face bioethical challenges unforeseen 27 years ago

By Nancy Frazier O'Brien
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- When Pope John Paul II was elected to the papacy in October 1978, the world's first test-tube baby was not yet 3 months old and a young woman named Karen Ann Quinlan remained in a New Jersey nursing home, breathing on her own two years after her parents won a court battle to remove her respirator.

It would take three years for the first test-tube baby to be born in the United States and four more after that before Quinlan, fed through a nasal gastric tube, would died of pneumonia.

As complicated as those bioethical issues of life and death seemed at the time, Pope John Paul II's successor will face a vastly more complex series of questions and challenges, according to Catholic bioethical experts interviewed by Catholic News Service.

Today, up to a million test-tube babies have been born worldwide, with questions just surfacing now about their long-term physical and emotional health. And the latest debate about the "right to die," in the case of the severely brain-damaged Terri Schindler Schiavo, involved withdrawing food and water, leading to her death from starvation and dehydration 13 days later, on March 31.

"By the time (Pope John Paul II) became pope, we were already dealing with abortion, and euthanasia really took hold during his pontificate," said John Haas, president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia.

But the bioethical questions that will confront the next pontiff will be much more scientific and technical, as stem-cell research involving human embryos gains greater acceptance in many parts of the world and various gene therapies permit the creation of "enhanced" human beings -- children with characteristics desired by their parents, athletes able to perform unheard-of feats and seniors whose bodies defy the aging process.

Haas said the issue of embryonic stem cells will present "a profound problem for Catholics in terms of doing molecular research." With research involving cells line derived from embryos "happening everywhere," he added, "We might be blessed if no therapies develop from embryonic stem cells" and more scientists turn their attention to adult stem cells, which have achieved some therapeutic successes in humans.

Since Louise Brown, the first test-tube baby, was born in England in July 1975, the question of children's parentage has become increasingly murky. In 1976, Michigan attorney Noel Keane wrote the first contract between a couple and a surrogate mother. Ten years later, "Baby M" in New Jersey became the subject of a lengthy and emotional court battle between her surrogate mother and her father.

These days, a baby might have five or more potential parents, as in the case of a divorcing California couple who no longer wanted the child created from a donor egg and donor sperm and carried by a surrogate mother. Or a child could have just one legal parent if, as one father of triplets has asked, a Tennessee court rules that his former girlfriend has no parental rights because the children she gave birth to were created from a donor egg and the father's sperm.

Helen Alvare, a law professor at The Catholic University of America in Washington and former spokeswoman for the U.S. bishops on pro-life matters, said the next pope will face "a huge ethical question" on the topic of "enhancements -- all the types of things that can enhance the human body or fix some problem."

She said some couples' "desire for the best possible child" can result in a mind-set that sees human life along the same lines as "souped-up SUVs and Hummers."

"What does it mean when you can buy human beings?" Alvare said, noting that laws against the sale of human body parts do not apply to the sale of sperm, eggs and embryos.

Also of grave concern for Pope John Paul II's successor will be the question of ordinary and extraordinary medical treatment and the withdrawal of food and water, highlighted by the case of Schiavo, who died two days before the pope.

Alvare recalled attending a symposium for Catholic lawyers in 1984 and planning a talk on the issues surrounding withdrawal of treatment. But a colleague told her then, she said, that her topic was "old hat" and the new ethical issue was withdrawal of food and water.

Haas, who sees an "increasing push for euthanasia" based strictly on medical views about quality of life and likelihood of survival, said he hoped Pope John Paul's own death would serve as a model for Catholic worldwide on end-of-life decisions.

The late pope's caregivers were "relatively modest in their interventions," but nothing was done to hasten the pope's death, he said.

On issues of life and death, Pope John Paul "has left such a tremendous legacy," Haas added. "It may take a generation for it to be fully understood."

END

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