There is a disturbing trend in science and medicine. If you don't like it or it doesn't fit what you want, just redefine it. This has been done before, but recently I have seen it more and more. When scientists wanted to harvest cells from week old human embryos, they called them pre-embryos, batches of cells or fertilized eggs. None of which are really accurate. When scientists wanted to cloned human embryos for research they called them altered eggs or cloned cells. Some even denied that the cloning process was cloning at all.
Even Francis Colllins, the God-fearing scientist at the head of the NIH, holds that somehow a cloned embryo is different than an IVF embryo even though both give rise to adult organisms in animals. I will let you in on a secret: They are not really different. (I mean they are called clones for a reason.) It is just easier to justify creating a human life for research if you call it something else.
My favorite has to be the IVF doctors in the UK that redefined conception to assuage the concerns of parents asking for preimplantation genetic diagnosis. They said that the embryos they were testing for genetic diseases hadn't been conceived yet.
When we marginalize the beginning of life with redefinitions to make it easier to harvest desirable biological material, the same is bound to happen at the end of life and all points in between. Wesley J. Smith, in his piece Killing for Organs, discusses how an editorial at Nature wants to redefine death to make harvesting organs for transplant easier:
But there is a growing chorus among the medical and bioethical intelligentsia to obtain more organs by harvesting living patients. Yes, some of our most influential voices now seek a license to kill for organs.They don’t put it that bluntly, of course. Rather—reflecting the spirit of our times—advocates argue that our definition of death should be changed to allow a great pretense that living patients are actually dead, thus permitting organ procurement.
For example, the internationally prestigious science journal Nature recently editorialized for the liberalization of the rules governing the declaration of brain death in order to obtain more organs.
Currently, brain death requires the irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain and each of its constituent parts. Nature’s editorial claimed—without proof—that doctors obey “the spirit but not the letter, of this law. And many are feeling uncomfortable about it.”
As well they should. But the proper answer to unethical practice isn’t to accommodate wrong behavior by redefining it as right. Rather, it is to work to bring actual methods back into proper alignment with legal and ethical practice.
That definitely seems to be the modus operandi these days, we "accommodate wrong behavior by redefining it as right." And where is that going to end up? Smith knows:
Instead, Nature descends into rank relativism, arguing that “the legal details of declaring death in someone who will never again be the person he or she was should be weighed against the value of giving a full and healthy life to someone who will die without transplant.”
In other words, some of us are more valuable than others of us, and those deemed inferior can be used as if they were mere natural resources.
In that seductive prescription is the end of human equality and universal rights.
