I’m going to look at some of the things being said in high places to rationalise the established policy of allowing unborn children to be killed at their mothers’ request, and the emerging, not yet established policy, of allowing children to be brought into existence for the purpose only of being used to provide spare parts for other people. Most of the ways of talking and arguing that I shall look at are evasions intended to mask what is being chosen and done. Hence my title.
But in some respects, or on some occasions, the public discourse has recently been a little less evasive than perhaps it was before. An American moral and political philosopher, Jeffrey Reiman, recently published a book called Critical Moral Liberalism: Theory and Practice (1997) which adopts and hands on many of the arguments which in relation to the American academic scene might be described as centre-liberal. About abortion he makes two things clear. First: the right to abortion which he is interested in defending and promoting is precisely the right to end the life of, to kill, the unborn. It would not be enough to have the right to simply expel the fetus from its mother’s body, and to have a right to end its life only when doing so was necessary for expelling it. That, he says, would be a negation of the woman’s right. To be valuable, in the way it is valued by so many men and women, the woman’s right must be, and of course legally is, the right to get the baby dead. If the mother had a duty to provide care outside the womb for her expelled fetus, she simply would not have that ‘right to abortion’ which women have now.
The second thing that Reiman makes clear makes his position rather less centrist, for the time being. The newly born child has absolutely no rights. One has no rights at all until one has both awareness of oneself and concern for oneself. New-borns, infants up to an age which he specifies only vaguely, and certain mentally handicapped persons all have no right to life, do not deserve to live, and are not worthy of respect. This blunt denial of the very ideas of human equality and human rights has not caused much, if any stir, in the American academe: I don’t know of any public criticism of it except by me and a few friends of mine. Reiman is not proposing that the laws against infanticide be repealed; he is not in favour of killing young children, because so many people love them that it would be offensive. But they have, morally speaking, no rights, do not deserve to live, and are not intrinsically worthy of respect as distinct from affection. As you can imagine, Reiman has no convincing defence of his claim that adults have a right not to be killed while they are asleep - given that at that time, they, like infants, lack self-awareness and concern.
We will meet an antihumanist position like Reiman’s at the end of my talk, when I look at the recent declaration in Defence of Cloning by famous ‘Humanist Laureates of the International Academy of Humanism.’
Another moment of truth, or at least frankness, came in the judgement of the main block of judges of the Supreme Court of the United States in the 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood of SouthEastern Pennsylvania v. Casey. The United States government of the day, and the brave Democrat Governor of Pennsylvania and many others requested the Court to overrule its decision in 1973, in Roe v. Wade, creating a constitutional right to abortion on demand up to 24 weeks and abortion for any ‘health’ reason up to complete birth. This request was turned down by a majority of 5:4. The judgements of the five majority judges, some of them appointed by President Reagan in the hope that they would overrule Roe v Wade, are full of untruth and evasion, of course. A few sentences will give the flavour:
Some of us as individuals find abortion offensive to our most basic principles of morality, but that cannot control our decision. Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code.
At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.
Abortion ... is fraught with consequences for others: for the woman who must live with the implications of her decision; for the persons who perform and assist in the procedure; for the spouse, family, and society which must confront the knowledge that these procedures exist, procedures some deem nothing short of an act of violence against innocent human life; and, depending on one’s beliefs, for the life or potential life that is aborted.
And so on. But there is a moment of frankness. These judges are considering what would be the consequence of overruling Roe v Wade, and they confront the argument that ‘reproductive planning could take virtually immediate account of any sudden restoration of state authority to ban abortions.’ And their response is:
for two decades of economic and social developments, people have organised intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail. The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated ......
And so on. Abortion as nothing more nor less than contraception, needed for reasons having nothing to do with health or anything other than the opportunity to combine equal participation in the economic and social life of the Nation with frequent and spontaneous sexual intercourse.
Of course, this is frankness, or shamelessness, not moral truth; it has all the moral truth of advice such as ‘The most important thing in life is to look after number one.’
The judgement of these judges was brilliantly demolished in the dissenting judgement of Justice Scalia, at that time the only practising Roman Catholic on the Court. (The architect of Roe v Wade, and its most resourceful defender up to 1990, was a practising Roman Catholic called William J Brennan.) But there is a tragic gap at the heart of Scalia’s judgement, too. He points out that the whole judgement in Roe v Wade and in the majority decision in Casey’s case just assumes that the life of the unborn is not a human life but merely ‘potentiality of human life’. He points out that that assumption is never proved and never even defended against counter-argument. But then, alas, he says, concerning this great question:
There is of course no way to determine that as a legal matter: it is in fact a value judgement.
No, Justice Scalia, it is not a value judgement, it is in fact a reality judgement. You must mean by ‘value judgement’ a ‘controversial judgement’. But even that is still too slack. By controversial you just mean controverted, actually the subject of the differing opinions. The opinion that until birth or until ‘viability’ the life of the unborn is not the life of a human being, indeed a human person in his or her early stages of life, is not a reasonable opinion. It would not be held by anyone unless they desired for themselves or for others the ‘liberty’, the choice, that is to say the power to eliminate that human being from their future, and desired also to conceal the nature of that choice from themselves or others by rationalisations, evasions of reality.
It is not surprising that it has become fashionable in recent years for philosophers to argue that the pro-life position on abortion can be ruled out of public discussion without any argument to show that is incorrect or mistaken in the judgements it makes or rests upon, whether judgements of fact about the nature of the unborn child or judgements of morality about human rights.
One of these philosophers is Judith Jarvis Thomson, who in 1970 produced the first philosophically elaborated argument for abortion along the lines of: a woman has a right to do what she likes with her body, and is under no obligation to lend her assistance to a stranger. In 1995 she produced a new argument, designed to justify the legal regime of abortion on demand, and to justify it without showing that there is anything wrong with the essential prolife argument that unborn children have a right not to be intentionally or unjustly killed and a right to the equal protection of the laws against homicide. The argument runs like this:
First, restrictive regulation [of abortion] severely constrains women’s liberty. Second, severe constraints on liberty may not be imposed in the name of considerations that the constrained are not unreasonable in rejecting. And third, the many women who reject the claim that the fetus has a right to life from the moment of conception are not unreasonable in doing so. 1
Remember, she is not going to produce any reasons to think that the opinion of these women is correct and the opinion of pro-lifers incorrect. The whole point of this argument, as she makes clear, is to gain its conclusion without contesting the central anti-abortion moral arguments and conclusions, that unborn children have a right not to be intentionally or unjustly killed and a right to the equal protection of the laws against homicide. This is why we should call her position an elaborate evasion.
Her argument, or manoeuvre, fails to meet its objective. She admits that she is offering no argument to show that the unborn are in different case from (say) the newly-born in relation to being killed, and the moral right not to be killed, and the moral right to have the law’s protection. But in the absence of such an argument, the position of the many women who deny that the unborn child has a right to life is not, as she claims, reasonable. It is unreasonable. That fact that these many women, or some of them, are reasonable in all or many or some other respects in no way establishes that this position of theirs is reasonable or in accordance with public reason. A person can still be called ‘a reasonable person’ even if he or she adopts an unreasonable position in one or even several cases (especially cases which so obviously engage his or her self-interest or other special emotional sources of bias).
The leading American political philosopher, John Rawls, has adopted the substance of Thomson’s argument. He did so as a fall-back position. Earlier, in an infamous passage of his book Political Liberalism, he had claimed that ‘all reasonable people can be expected to agree’ that healthy mature women have the right to kill their child for their own convenience during the first three months of his or her unborn life and probably for longer, and that because ‘all reasonable people can be expected to agree’ those who disagree are undemocratic and their opinion must be disregarded without any argument; it would be wrong to try to refute their prolife arguments by public debate with them, say in Congress or the House of Commons. This passage did not give widespread satisfaction, even among supporters of liberal abortion. So his fallback is Thomson’s position.
Having claimed that a majority decision which authorises the free killing of the unborn ‘is to be seen as reasonable’ and ‘binding on citizens by the majority principle’, even if it is fallacious and erroneous and is thus a denial of basic justice, Rawls goes on to make several claims about anti-abortion citizens (prejudicially called by him ‘Catholics’).
‘[1] [T]hey need not exercise the right of abortion in their own case. [2] They can recognise the right as belonging to legitimate law and therefore [3] do not resist it by force. [4] To do that would be unreasonable: it would mean attempting to impose their own comprehensive doctrine, which a majority of other citizens who follow public reason do not accept.’ (1vi-1vii)
None of these four claims is reasonable. Claim [1] reveals the negligence which passes itself off as ‘public reason’ on Rawls’ side of the debate. The anti-abortion citizens are claiming, with some good arguments, that abortion is rather like slave-owning: a radical, basic injustice imposed on people deprived of the protections of citizenship. The response, ‘You free citizens need not exercise the right to [own slaves] [abort your children] in your own case, so you can and must recognise our law as legitimate as it applies to the rest of us’, is mere impudence, or thoughtlessness.
Claim [2] - ‘They can recognise the right as belonging to legitimate law’ - assumes that ‘the majority principle’ is binding even when the majority authorise gross injustice, and even when they do so without attempting to show that it is consistent with the principle or criterion of reciprocity. Does anyone believe that Rawls himself accepts this assumption in relation to injustices which engage his sympathies?
A similarly mock-philosophical argument has recently been proposed by the leading German political philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, who draws a distinction between ;’ethics’ and ‘morality’. Ethics, he says, is concerned just with ‘how one sees oneself and who one would like to become’. It is thus in a different domain from ‘morality’, which is concerned with ‘the interests of all’.2 This distinction he then deploys in much the same way as Rawls deploys his own distinction between ‘comprehensive doctrines’ and ‘public reasons’. In each case the author treats the distinction he has drawn as enabling him to set aside, but without seeking to refute, objections to legally permitting and authorising the deliberate killing of very young or irreversibly damaged (unconscious?) human beings. That is to say, each distinction is an elaborate device for evading the great issues at stake. Rawls, as I said, shunts aside the objections to killing young unborn babies, claiming that these objections are not within the alleged ‘overlapping consensus’ or ‘reasonable’ in the ‘public’ sense. Habermas shunts similar objections aside as being merely ‘ethical’ and thus concerned, not with what is required by a morally indispensable respect for the interests of all as equals, but only with what is ‘best for us’ (i.e. for the partisans of this or that ethical opinion). He thus proposes a quite fallacious rationalisation for abandoning very many of our fellow human beings, by legally authorising the intentional termination of their lives. In doing so, he abandons his own fundamental ‘moral’ thesis that decisions must be taken in the interests of all, and he lays aside his own ‘appeal to an ever-wider community.’3
His argument goes like this. The usual arguments between supporters and opponents of abortion are not moral arguments. They are merely ‘ethical’, that is, concerned with ‘the ethical question of which regulation is respectively ‘best for us’ from ‘our’ point of view.4 So: when it becomes apparent that in reality the disagreement ‘cannot be resolved either by discourse or by compromise’, then the matter must, he says, be raised to a new ‘level’:
Each participant must turn away from the ethical question ... They must, instead, take the moral point of view and examine which regulation is ‘equally good for all’ in view of the prior claim to an equal right to coexist.’5
The ‘all’ for whom the regulation is to be ‘equally good’ do not include the unborn (or the irreversibly unconscious), but rather the ‘all’ comprising those who want or ‘need’ to choose these killings, all those who oppose them, and all who look on more or less indifferently. The ‘equal right to coexist’ is emphatically not the ‘equal right of the unborn and the permanently unconscious’ which those on one side of the so-called ‘ethical’ debate had been asserting. No, indeed. Anyone on that side of the debate must now - in virtue of the other side’s ‘right to coexistence’ - stand aside to let people on the other side opt for the killings they (often, no doubt, reluctantly) propose:
... the normative expectation connected with this - that when necessary we tolerate the members of another group whose behaviour is ethically reprehensible to ‘our’ view - does not necessarily imply any damage to our integrity: ‘we’ (for instance, as Catholics confronted by a ‘liberal’ abortion law) may continue at an ethical level to abhor the legally permissible practice of others as we have in the past. Instead, what is legally required of us is tolerance for practices that in ‘our’ view are ethically deviant.6
But all this distorts almost beyond recognition the actual and historical discourses on abortion, euthanasia, and their legislation. When the Walton Committee report on euthanasia explained its unanimous rejection of legalised euthanasia or assisting in suicide, it did so precisely on the ground of right:
society’s prohibition of intentional killing ... is the cornerstone of law and social relationships. It protects each one of us impartially, embodying the belief that all are equal.7
When Peter Singer and I debated these matters at the Philosophy Society in Oxford in May 1998, it did not for a moment occur to us or, I dare say, to any of the many philosophers in the room, that either of us was discussing what is ‘respectively best for me/my group’ from ‘me/my group’s point of view’ or what preserves or damages ‘my integrity’ conceived (absurdly, as Socrates showed) as separable from justice. The naive relativism implicit in the claim that the ethical question is What is good (or right) from my point of view?’ was decisively criticised and left behind by analytical philosophy by, at latest, 1960, with the demonstration that it makes ethical discourse (argument, disputation) practically senseless.
The sentence of Rawls directed at ‘Catholics’, strikingly similar to Habermas’s invitation to ‘for instance, Catholics’ stand aside and allow abortion and euthanasia because such ‘behaviour’ ‘does not necessarily imply any damage to [y]our integrity.’ In Rawls’ words: ‘They [Catholics] need not exercise the right of abortion in their own case.8 So the position is this. Citizens opposed to abortion are claiming, with some good arguments, that abortion is rather like slave-owning. (The overwhelmingly secular and non-Catholic Walton Committee saw essentially the same issue of basic equality rights at stake in euthanasia.) The argument of these citizens is that the killings whose legislation Rawls and Habermas defend are a radical, basic injustice imposed on people deprived or to be deprived of the protections of citizenship. The response(s) suggested by the argumentation of Rawls and Habermas would run something like: ‘You free citizens need not exercise the right to [own slaves] [abort your children] in your own case, so you can and must recognise our law as legitimate as it applies to the rest of us (and as we will enforce it against you if you interfere)’ ‘You people need not do any of this [killing] [slave owning] yourselves, so your integrity is undamaged and so you should (and will be compelled) to stand aside to allow us, in the exercise of our prior right of coexistence with you, to [‘coexist’ with our slaves] [terminate our coexistence with these unborn children/fetuses and with people whose lives are not worth living].’9 As an argument for tolerating injustice, this has some force. As an argument of the kind intended by Rawls and Habermas - an argument that there is no injustice - it is a sheer evasion, and a failure.
Cloning is a matter of asexual reproduction; biologically speaking the fact that it is copying is only an implication of that fact. (In the technique used to produce Dolly the sheep, the husk of a female sex cell was used, plus the body cell of another sheep; but male sexuality has simply disappeared from the production process, except insofar as it was involved some time in the pre-cloning past, in the procreation, the sexual generation, of the donor (or some ancestor of the donor) of the now-to-be-cloned body cell. The human being produced by cloning is a twin - a ‘delayed genetic twin’ - of the quasi-parent (donor) whose body cell has been used to produce the clone. This donor-parent-twin might be a very young embryo split by artificially induced twinning. Or it might be an adult, one of whose body cells, inserted into the husk of a sex cell, has been artificially ‘switched on’ so that it will have the ‘totipotency’ - the capacity to develop by division into any part of the body - which each of the cells has in a zygote or a very young embryo in the first five or six days of his or her life.
It is worth noticing at the outset that both these techniques of cloning show up the hollowness of a line of argument which has often been exploited by theologians and others wanting to justify their claim that the embryo is not a human being, or human individual, until after the time when the cells which make up the embryo have ceased to be totipotent and have become specialised. These lines of argument are unsound for many reasons; fundamentally, the embryo, even the one or two-cell or four-cell embryo, is fully individual, with unity, identity and wholeness quite indistinguishable from its parts, even when those parts are cells which happen each to be more or less totipotent. And this is just made obvious by the fact that, as the experiments that produced Dolly the sheep established, the cell of an adult can be taken and made totipotent, so that that adult is twinned, without at all losing the individuality which in truth he or she has had from conception.
If and when such cloning of whole human organisms, embryos, foetuses, children, becomes possible, the child - the embryo - thus produced will be, of course, a fully human being, as incommunicably unique a person as any ordinary twin, or, indeed as any other person. But the circumstances of his or her generation, by production, will dramatise something already to be found, if less dramatically, in all generation of children by in vitro fertilisation (IVF).10 This feature of the generation of children by IVF was identified with care by the lay philosophers who carried out the analysis11 whose essential conclusion appears in the Catechism of the Catholic Church para. 2377.
Such fertilisation entrusts the life and identity of the embryo into the power of doctors and biologists and establishes the domination of technology over the origin and destiny of the human person. Such a relationship of domination is in itself contrary to the dignity and equality that must be common to parents and children.
One of those lay philosophers, Germain Grisez takes up the philosophical reflection: Of course those who choose to produce a baby make that choice only insofar as a means to an ulterior end. They may well intend that the baby be received in an authentic child-parent relationship, in which he or she will live in the communion befitting those who share personal dignity. If realised, this intended end will be good for the baby as well as for the parents. But, even so, the choice to produce the baby is the choice of a bad means to a good end, because the baby’s initial status as a produce is subpersonal. The significance of this status is most clear when the laboratory’s defective products are discarded and its surplus products used for lethal experiments.12
So the basic issue at stake in cloning as in all forms of in vitro fertilisation is the issue of equality in dignity. That equality in dignity is much more subtly compromised in these technological choices and procedures, of course, than in the barbarism of death-intending abortions. But it is compromised and violated nonetheless. As the unborn child has a right not to be made the object of such an intention to kill, so it has the right not to have been conceived, brought into being, as a product. The right avails, in moral truth if not in positive law and practice, whether the technique is straightforward IVF, or is cloning if embryos by ‘twin fission’ or the cloning of an adult source.
The right to equality in being brought to life, and the right to equality in the face of threat of being killed, are of course one and the same right in two applications. And the applications come together, and the right is doubly violated, in the practice of experimenting lethally on test-tube babies, whether for the purpose of perfecting existing IVF techniques, or for discoveries in ‘pure science,’ or for bringing into being and beginning to perfect a new technique such as cloning from the cells of more or less grown-up human beings. Manifestly too, it is violated by procedures such as are envisaged more or less favourably by the report issued last December (1998) by the Human Embryology Authority and the Human Genetics Advisory Commission.
This report rejects what it calls human reproductive cloning, which it defines as ‘the creation of human beings genetically identical to one another or to any other human being.’ But by ‘human being’ it arbitrarily means something like a more or less fully developed human being. This becomes apparent when the report recommends that human cloning and other techniques of nuclear replacement technology be permitted to be employed to produce human embryos, fully human organisms such as you and I were during the first 14 days of our life, provided that these human beings are used to provide spare parts for others and are then destroyed before they have developed beyond the 14-day stage. In calling these human beings I am, of course, just acknowledging the reality which the report of these authorities is trying to evade, but which is recognised spontaneously and accurately by Dr R G Edwards when he described the first of his products, one of whom was Louise Brown the so-called first test-tube baby. Edwards in his book describes the conceptus, even in the pre-implantation stage as ‘a microscopic human being - one in its very earliest stages of development.’13
For these committees, each headed by a lawyer like me and each equipped with its statutory theologian, the die has already been cast:
3.3 Around 23% of respondents indicated that in their view any form of embryo research/manipulation was simply wrong because they believe that the embryo possesses the full moral status of a human being. There were 24% who thought that the 14 day limit was arbitrary, some of them considering that it could be open to the possibility of extension. Both these points of view are questioning decisions enshrined in the 1990 Act ... the relevant issues were fully debated, both in Parliament and by the wider public, at the time of the passing in the HFE Act ... It would not be appropriate to use this limited enquiry into cloning to reopen the wider questions relating to work with human embryos.
5.2 There was a significant response, primarily from individuals, rejecting all research using human embryos. However, the Human Fertilisation and Embryo Act permits licensed research on human embryos up to 14 days of development - An amendment to prohibit the creation of embryos for research was defeated by a large majority in the House of Commons and by a very large majority in the House of Lords. Thus the production of a human embryo by CNR [cell nucleus replacement] for research purposes could be permitted, provided that the research project was licensed by the HFEA according to the strict criteria that such a licence demands.
A very large majority in the House of Lords. This should not surprise us in the least. Our elites contain more than their fair share of people like the famous ‘Humanist Laureates of the International Academy of Humanism’ who in June 1997 issued a Declaration in Defence of Cloning and the Integrity of Scientific Research. The 31 signatories include names like Sir Isaiah Berlin, Francis Crick, Richard Dawkins, Sir Hermann Bondi, W V Quine, Anthony Flew, and so on. The only politician is Simone Veil, former President of the European Parliament and architect of the French abortion law. The only medical practitioner is Pieter Admiraal, Medical Doctor, The Netherlands, the arch-pioneer of Holland’s murderous euthanasia programme. The declaration begins by welcoming the development of cloning of higher animals, speaks briefly of the need to prevent abuses (unspecified), and then settles down to its theme. Reason is humanity’s most powerful tool. But some religions defy reason by teaching that ‘human capabilities appear to differ in degree, not in kind, from those found among higher animals.’ (So much for human equality, which is nothing if it is not the equality whereby all human beings share in the same nature which, though fully animal, is also different in kind from other animals by including as its very form the intellectual animating principle we call soul.) The savants fear that beneficial research ‘may be suppressed solely because it conflicts with some people’s religious beliefs.’ (But of course, the belief in the unity of human nature is not as such a religious belief, and the objections to destructive and exploitative research on human embryos is that insults and violates their humanity.) ‘It is important’, they continue, ‘to recognise that similar religious objections were once raised against autopsies, anaesthesia ...’ and so on. Here the elite resort to myths and black propaganda. The Church which condemns cloning and IVF never condemned medical autopsies, which emerged as a general practice in 13th Century Italy, and never condemned anaesthesia. These stories are like the myth that people in the middle ages thought the world was flat - a story invented out of whole cloth by venomously anti-religious propagandists in the 18th Century and naively believed by 20th century elites and school-teachers alike. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century describes numerous ways, which he learned from his schoolmasters, of proving that the world is round, a sphere.
Finally, the savants get round to answering their own question. What moral issues would human cloning raise? Here is their answer in full:
We see no inherent ethical dilemmas in cloning nonhuman higher animals. Nor is it clear to us that future developments in cloning human tissues or even cloning human beings will create moral predicaments beyond the capacity of human reason to solve. The moral issues raised by cloning are neither large nor more profound that the questions human beings have already faced in regards to such technologies as nuclear energy, recombinant DNA, and computer encryption. They are simply new.
That’s it. The remaining paragraph is mere rhetoric about ‘Luddite options’, ‘ancient theological scruples’ and ‘traditionalist and obscurantist views’ as against ‘beneficial scientific developments’. But the wilful claim that dealing with human beings, by producing and harvesting them, buying and selling them, using them up for spare parts, and at length destroying them, is all morally on a par with, for example, ‘computer encryption’ is, I must say, evasion travelling to new depths of shameless inhumanity. Human reason can indeed ‘solve’ these ‘moral predicaments’ and has already done so, in principle. The principle is: respect for human life, dignity and equality in dignity. It’s just that they and many other powerful people don’t like that answer.
1 Judith Jarvis Thomson, ‘Abortion’, Boston Review 20:3 (1995) 11 at 15 [Back]
2 Cf. Habermas. ‘On the Pragmatic, the Ethical, and the Moral Employments of Practical Reason’, in Justification and Application, 1-17. [Back]
3 Habermas, ‘Reply to Symposium Participants’, Cardozo Law Review 17 (1996) 1477 at 1486. [Back]
7 Report of the House of Lords Select Committee on Medical Ethics (Chairman: Lord Walton), 31 January 1994, para.237, reprinted in John McKeown, Euthanasia Examined (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 102. [Back]
8 Political Liberalism, 1vi-1vii. [Back]
9 The failure of Rawls’s and Habermas’s arguments does not entail that there are no grounds for coexisting with people who authorise and fund abortions of convenience, practise euthanasia, or intend the nuclear destruction - in certain eventualities - of entire cities with their inhabitants. I have explored these matters a bit further in Finnis, Boyle and Grisez, Nuclear Deterrence, Morality and Realism, ch. 13; Finnis, ‘Public Reason, Abortion, and Cloning’, Valparaiso University Law Review 32 (1998) 1 at 10, 16. [Back]
10 Paul Ramsey, Fabricated Man: The Ethics of Genetic Control (Yale U.P., 1970), 64. [Back]
11 See especially In Vitro Fertilisation and Public Policy, Evidence submitted to the Government Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology by the Catholic Bishops’ Joint Committee on Bio-Ethical Issues (London, Catholic Information Services, May 1983). [Back]
12 Living a Christian Life (1993), 267-8. [Back]
13 Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe, A Matter of Life (London 1981) 83. [Back]