The EU and stem cell research

Why Europe may soon split along religious lines

Stephen Pollard

4 August 2007

Stephen Pollard says that if embryonic stem cell research is banned in some parts of Europe — as it might be under the new EU treaty — old hostilities will resurface

If you’re lost after that last sentence already, that’s probably why no one else has noticed it. But here it is. It’s termed a ‘Unilateral Declaration by Poland’: ‘The Charter does not affect in any way the right of Member States to legislate in the sphere of public morality, family law as well as the protection of human dignity and respect for human physical and moral integrity.’

Seems a bit obscure? It isn’t. It goes to the heart of EU society and presages — within the next decade — a revived social division across the EU based on religion. Because ‘...the protection of human dignity and respect for human physical and moral integrity’ is EU-speak for bans on new medical areas such as embryonic stem cell research, gene therapy and even the latest breakthrough, RNA (ribonucleic acid). The declaration is designed to ensure that member state governments will remain free to ban such research.

One should state at the outset that Poland — or any other member state — should of course be free to legislate as it sees fit on such matters. That Poland feels the need for such a declaration is because of the very issue on which most comment on the draft treaty has been based — that the new voting arrangements threaten to trample on member states’ freedoms.

But the issues raised by such technologies go beyond the capacity of democracies to resist.

The new medical technologies, which promise unprecedented breakthroughs, are hugely controversial. Opponents of embryonic stem cell research, the most contentious, are usually thought of as religious conservatives. Certainly when, in 2004, the then House Republican leader in the US, Tom DeLay, opposed a bill that would have allowed discarded embryos to be used as sources of stem cells, he cast himself as doing so in the spirit of the three main Abrahamic religions. ‘An embryo,’ he said, ‘is a person, a distinct internally directed, self-integrating human organism. We were all at one time embryos ourselves. So was Abraham. So was Mohammad. So was Jesus of Nazareth.’ The US’s Roman Catholic bishops concurred, issuing a statement opposing such research as ‘immoral, illegal and unnecessary’.