9-13-2015 Bioethics Part 24

The speaker begins with a prayer and acknowledges that the topic of abortion is difficult and controversial. They discuss the question of whether abortion is always wrong and explore different scenarios where it might be considered. They also address the issue of encouraging women who are victims of rape or incest to get abortions, arguing against it. The speaker emphasizes the importance of listening and understanding others' situations and viewing potential victims of abortion as neighbors. They then transition to discussing the topics of mentally and physically handicapped individuals and gene therapy. They pose questions about the possibility of curing the mentally handicapped through gene therapy and the limits of gene therapy. They also mention the issue of the handicap in church and the importance of prayer. Finally, they provide a brief explanation of gene therapy and its potential applications in preventing or curing diseases. Let's pray before we begin. God, we thank you for this lovely, cool morning, and as we come together to talk about some things that are not very easy to understand, and definitely not easy to talk about, that you would give us wisdom. In Jesus' name, amen. For the last couple of weeks, we've been looking at the quite difficult and controversial topic of what? Abortion. That's right. We were trying to answer a question, is abortion, always, without question, in every single case, wrong? Yes or no? No. Now, you want to be quick when you say that, because you say, wait, hold on, are you saying that you think abortion is right? Is saying no to that question saying that abortion is okay? No. Okay, so we talked about how there are, like, kind of just very broad categories in which we go, well, if it's in this category, abortion is okay, if it's over here, it's not okay. But what are some areas in which, at least, it might be hypothetically possible that abortion is the best of all terrible options? Because you told me the answer the other day, I think, um, one of the answers is, like, the mother should be the same as the baby. Right. So, if it's life of the mother, life of the child, then, and again, this is why it's not broad categories, it's not, you go with one or you go with the other. It's equally wrong to say, it's always the life of the mother, as it would be to say, it's always the life of the child. It depends on circumstance, and there's not, we're not even going to break it down further, this isn't a flow chart, like, well, if X, then this way, if Y, then you go this way. There's things to take into consideration. It is not inherently an act of love to sacrifice yourself for the good of your child, if, for example, you're going to stick your husband with three kids and a newborn, just because, you know, that's the way you want to go out. That might be the right option, but it's an option that needs to be considered in the whole other wide range of options, as we really think about, and help others think about, some of the toughest decisions you're ever going to make in your entire life. There was one other category that's much more rare, but at least, maybe, possible, what would that case be? Rape and incest, that's right. Isn't it true that we should just encourage all those women to get abortions? No. That's right. Why is it, there's lots of reasons why that's just fundamentally wrong, but what's something that comes to your mind, like, why should we not encourage women? A lot of people do. Why should we not encourage women who are victims of impregnation through rape or incest to get abortions? Okay, there's a better option, but how can you, Tim, look a woman in the face, and you never, you've never been in that situation. How can you look her in the face and say, you should carry that baby to term? I'm not going to until you answer my question. There's a serious amount of wisdom to that. Yes. Good job, Tim. Also, way to get out of the question. The argument goes like this, just because an innocent party has been the victim of injustice does not give one the right to then turn towards a more innocent party and commit a deeper injustice. In this case, rape does not mean that you should be able to then, which is a crime against you, right, to then go and turn and then murder your neighbor as a result of that. As we looked at as well, the research indicates that the kind of common argument is, well, this woman is always going to be carrying around inside of her a physical representation of her violation, which is technically true, but the research shows that the women who do carry these children to term ordinarily, in almost every single case, grow an affection towards that child as the time goes further down the road, and if you take that child away, then maybe in the moment the woman would feel a little bit better, until maybe some time passes and she realizes that I took a life, which will then send her tail spinning off into something else. The key principle that we learned is that presence in the lives of others is key. We must be the kinds of people who are willing to spend time with others to understand the situations that they're in in order to speak God's truth to the situations they find themselves in. Listening, as I'm sure any person in here who is married or currently dating, listening is one of the hardest things to do in the world. Speaking is relatively easy, but actually listening and paying attention and being willing to then engage on what the person is talking about is some of the hardest stuff to do in the world. We also learned that you and I have to first view the possible victims of abortion as what? What are they to us? The primary category that they are to us is our neighbor. That's right. They are not the objects of our compassion. They are not some kind of special member of society or something. They're first and foremost neighbor. Neighbors who have a demand on our attention. You and I very well may not know any women who are currently struggling with abortion or the option of abortion. You and I very well might not know cases in which that woman would be willing to give that child up or something. We shouldn't beat ourselves up about it. What we should do is ask the very more difficult questions is, am I open? Am I living in a way that's open towards people who are considering having abortions or abortionists themselves? Am I living in such a way that that person might feel comfortable in my home or am I such a judgmental and closed person that that person would never come within a thousand miles of me? Am I the kind of person who's open or seeking to be open because it's very hard. It's not like this should be easy. This is some of the hardest stuff in the Christian life. Am I the kind of person that desires to be open towards my neighbor and showing hospitality, knowing that hospitality isn't hanging out with my friends. It's doing the hard thing of showing love to the most furthest reaches of neighbor. That's where hospitality and love of neighbor comes into real play. Just think for a minute who the most difficult people to love are. In your case, for me it's children. I don't like kids. I like my own kids most of the time. Kids are the area which I struggle with the most. I'm not up here like, I love kids. You should love kids. And I don't love kids, but I am called to love kids. Loving my neighbor does not include everybody that's just over the age of 13. It's not the call of the extraordinary Christian to show charity towards your neighbor. It is the essence of what it means to follow Jesus. And that is very hard. It will take the rest of our lives to figure out what that means. We must be the kinds of people who are directed into those kinds of ways. This week we're going to shift to a very different topic. Beginning to leave the thought of conception itself and abortion and then look at kind of life going forward. So today and next week we will be taking up the task of talking about the mentally and physically handicapped and gene modification. Here's why. In the words of Stanley Hauerwas, one of my great heroes, in his usual succinct way he says this. We can care for the cancer patients by trying to alleviate their cancer without destroying the patient. But you cannot eliminate retardation without destroying the person who is retarded. Such policies seem good because we assume compassion requires us to try to rid the world as much as possible of unnecessary suffering. Those born retarded seem to be suffering from outrageous fortune, cruel fate, and that if possible should be eliminated. Ironically, in the name of responding to suffering, compassion literally becomes a killer. The question is, what if? What if we didn't have to kill the mentally handicapped? What if we could cure them? The second question is, what should the limits of gene therapy be, the possible solution to curing things like physical handicaps and mental handicaps? And number three, this is the question we're going to take up next week, and I state the question provocatively on purpose, but many people speak this way. What should we do about the problem of the handicap in church? It's a terrible question, and we'll see why. Yes, Jake? That's a good start, yes. We should pray for them, if you didn't hear that. We should, we should pray for everybody. What should we do about them? First, though, what if the mentally handicapped were not destroyed, but could be cured through gene therapy? You might be going, what the heck is gene therapy, Jeremy? I was speaking to some people about this yesterday, and they're like, why on earth are you talking about this kind of stuff at Sunday school? Here's what gene therapy is, briefly. It's using genes to prevent disease, or cure disease. This comes in three ways. The scientific kind of real complicated factors about how this is done through viruses and vectors and all that kind of stuff, we're not going to get into today, so this isn't about to be a biology lesson, simply this. This is what gene therapy is. You're going to start hearing about it a lot more. We talk about it all the time, especially in bioethics and in kind of the broad science community in general. Here's why. Through gene therapy, at least hypothetically, and it's kind of right around the corner, we're already doing this in animals and stuff like that. The first thing you can do is remove a damaged gene and put a normal one in its place. The second thing you can do is just shut a damaged gene off if you didn't need that gene to express itself in order to live. Give somebody a gene that they don't have in order to fill a gap, essentially. That's what gene therapy is. Many diseases. Some of the most brutal, incurable, horrific diseases today are gene-based. To maybe approach the level of our hopes when it comes to gene therapy today, the estimate was back in 2013 that we had spent over $600 million in research trying to figure out how to do this. Because if possible, we'll be able to cure things that are today just incurable nightmares. Such as leukemia, for one. Which, if you've never known anybody with leukemia, it's terrible. Literally, your blood has cancer and you ain't coming back from that. Almost ever. And children have a propensity to get it. What must be said from the outset is that gene therapy is kind of the next miracle pill in our society. It's the thing that's right out of our grasp but we're all longing for it. You might not be longing for it this morning but understand that there are hundreds of thousands of people here and around the world who are longing for it because they are currently suffering or one of the people in their family or somebody they know is currently suffering from a gene-based disease. The problem with such things is that sometimes they can leave us discontent with our current options. Imagine this. Cystic fibrosis. Another gene-based disease. And the doctor tells you there's nothing we can do. There's something that we can do possibly in a couple years but we can't do it right now. But hopefully, through some research, people down the road will be able to get therapy and be cured of the thing that your child is going to inevitably eventually die from. That kind of thing happens all the time and it is very, very difficult to hear for the people who hear it. You and I always have to, as Christians, avoid the temptation to see doctors as our priests, to see hospitals as our temples and to see the priest bow to the false god of medicine. In our culture, it is one of the most gigantic temptations of false gods we have because we are all seeking to be perfect. Sickness in our society has come to be weird. When people die, we're all like, what? Why can't they cure that? We can't even cure the common cold. Those kinds of things should leave us rather humble. As Christians, who rightly worship the true and living God, we should see medicine for what it is, an incredible gift, including things, as I'm about to say, like gene therapy, but also a powerful gift that has equal ability to destroy us as it does to heal us. Not only are leukemia and cystic fibrosis diseases that people face today that could be solved through gene therapy, but even things like certain forms of mental retardation. The question is that we're trying to answer is, can Christians participate in these things? Again, as I've said multiple times, I stand down here and not up there for a reason on Sundays. It's a physical stance that I am able to do in this kind of current setup we have here for a reason. This isn't, thus sayeth the Lord. If you would like to search this book called The Bible for proof texts about gene therapy, go for it. But the reality is, this has nothing to say about any of that. But that doesn't mean that this doesn't have anything to do with shaping us into the kinds of people we ought to be who can think rightly about things like gene therapy, which is what we've done for a long time. Talk about what kinds of people we should be. Can we participate in this stuff? And I would say this, and I'm going to explain this, so don't be like, what is he doing up there? I would say that as long as we are speaking about the prevention of diseases by the treatment of somatic cells, then yes, it's something we can participate in. Again, there's two parts to that. We're going to explain these two parts. The first is the treatment of diseases or the prevention of diseases. And the second one is when we deal with somatic cells. If that's the case, then maybe. This gets to the second question of what should the limits of gene therapy be? There's two different kinds of gene therapy. Before we get into this, I'd just also like to remind you that I'm a pastor speaking to a church. So what I'm saying is not about what society should do at all. This isn't a public policy speech. However, what is interesting and what you should know is what we're about to talk about is not only the bright and shining possible future of medicine, it is also so terrifying that the people doing the research don't know if it should ever be used because it's so controversial. Hopefully, by the time we're done this morning, you will totally understand the controversy behind it. But just know that even in public policy stuff, the people who are doing the research themselves are like, yeah, this is cool and everything. I just don't know if we should use it. Much like Oppenheimer who was one of the key figures who developed the atomic bomb never wanted it to be used. That's what we're talking about here with the same level of potential for harm or for good. As long as we're dealing with somatic cells, we can do this. What's a somatic cell? So what is a somatic cell? No, it's just regular. What does somatic mean? There you go. And it's a cell that's part of our bodies. It's just a cell that's here in our bodies. Soma is a Greek word for body. It's a cell that belongs to our bodies. There's another kind of cell which is a germ cell. Now we think of germs as getting a cold or something like that. But in humans, what are our germ cells? There you go, egg and sperm. That would be our germ cells. Germ cells in a human body are egg and sperm because they have reproductive properties. We talked about this before. Birds of the bees. Egg and sperm come together and you get a completely different kind of being that is not like the egg or the sperm, though it has something to do with each. It's a brand new thing that never existed before and will never exist again. It's one of the most fascinating things in all of the world and nobody really knows exactly how it happens. 2 plus 2 equals 4 is a true statement but only given certain conditions. I learned this a while ago. I'm not exactly sure how this all works. It kind of blows my mind. I've got two apples here and two oranges here. That means I've got four pieces of fruit. That's one way of looking at it. What are you talking about? Why and how everything all works together? Which is fun. Life in all of its parts is still a bit of a mystery. So why say that you can do it with somatic cells and I'm about to say you can't do it with germ cells? We shouldn't. We're talking about doing it with germ cells but we should avoid it. The most horrifying and promising possibilities exist in the area of germ cell modification. Who talks about this stuff? You've probably heard about this. You've heard about designer babies? Talk about them all the time. A designer baby is a baby that is at least hypothetically possible through germ cell modification. What is a designer baby? This isn't a test. What do you think that is? Anybody? Like what? Choosing gender? What else? 7 feet tall. That's right. Hair, eye color. I work at Yes so we have lots of little kids that play on computers all the time and play games where they get to create their own characters. It's the same exact thing. I'm going to change the hair color. I like that. I'm going to change the eye color. I want to wear glasses. I want to be this tall. Nothing comes closer to playing God than messing with germ cells. And here's why. Because it is at this point that you and I are very much in the driver's seat of creation itself. While amazing possibilities are bound up in this area of technology which we've kind of mentioned and we'll get to in a minute I believe it's very much off the table for Christians no matter what the possible benefits are. You and I confess that first and foremost we are creatures who live under the authority of a creator and as creatures who have amazing abilities and amazing ingenuity and amazing creative powers that ought to be expressed very often we've got to know that at times limits are attached to our creatureliness that just because we can does not mean inevitably that we ought to do something. That makes sense in just kind of all of life, right? I can rob a bank. I can cheat on my wife. I can jump off a building. Just because I can do those things doesn't mean I should do those things even if doing those things brings me great personal gain or enjoyment. Just because we can shape human beings however we want them doesn't inevitably mean that we should. Rarely was ever such a case The reason why is because when we're talking about germ cell modification as opposed to somatic cell modification we're not talking about treating an individual. Remember, somatic cells are cells that make up parts of a body. If we're talking about somatic cells then I'm talking about my son Jake, right? If I'm going to treat Jake, Jake has a disease then we're treating Jake and his disease. Germ cell modification Let's not even talk about designer babies yet. Let's just talk about taking care of a disease. Let's say that Marge and I go, okay, let's see we have a propensity to produce a child with this disease because it is a child that for whatever reason the doctors are saying okay, you have this recessive gene you have this dominant gene. When these things pair up or two recessive genes or two dominant genes however that works out, the doctors go you've got a solid chance of having a child with this disease. Or, maybe we've already had maybe Alexis, my older daughter already has a disease and the doctors are like, yeah, I mean because of who you are, when that happened it's going to happen again. So let's say we're planning on having a second child we can take that disease away by messing with either or both the sperm and the egg combine them, put them in there put them in the oven, boom baby without the disease. That sounds like an amazing thing, doesn't it? There's only one problem. No, there's not only one problem about 5,000 of them. Can anybody think of any problems with that? No, like in this hypothetical scenario essentially what I'm asking you is why would you look me in the face and say that would be a wrong thing to do? That's right. There's a big one. Right. Good. Those are solid ones. We are not changing. Let's say Jake is the product of this thing this germ cell modification Jake comes from this. Jake is currently a real person who's sitting in front of us but Jake is not a real person at the moment of messing with the germ cells. We are not treating a person. What we are really treating in the case of germ cell modification is humanity. If we fix Jake's body, his somatic cells then that's who Jake becomes. We're fixing a disease he currently has. If though we fix his germ cells he's going to pass on whatever we give him to every single other human being that comes from his body or comes from the bodies that came from him. We're changing humanity. It gets beyond the realms of science or medicine. Medicine is trying to treat the person in front of us. Here we're not treating the person in front of us. We're treating all the hypothetical people in the future. You could say, look, who wants cystic fibrosis? Make it so that this couple doesn't have produce a child with cystic fibrosis. We've got to remember that human beings also, on top of these arguments human beings aren't cars. I hate cars, unless they run well which in that case is fine. But in a car, if your alternator isn't that the thing that charges the battery? See? I ain't dumb. If you put a new alternator in the car is the car going to run exactly the same as it did before but now it's going to charge the battery? Yes. Nothing changes on the car. The car does not care that you have a new alternator. You might put a bad alternator in the car and the only thing that's going to happen is your battery doesn't charge. Your whole car doesn't fall apart. Human beings are not like that. No cystic fibrosis? Fine. Then he gives birth to a child God only knows what's going to happen because of that one funky gene that we put in him but it's in his own germ cells that are going to be passed on to other kids. What happens 100 years down the line? When we're thinking about that kind of stuff we can't only think about Jake Yeah. Well, yeah. That's kind of true. Yes. It might work but it might cause irreparable harm. So if that's true if that's what germ cell modification is then we should just avoid it. It doesn't matter what we could do. Now let's be clear. If Jake has cystic fibrosis then through gene therapy we can cure it in Jake. So Jake's born. Jake has it. We should take it away. There is a sense in which we shouldn't play creators Marge gave us the argument that you're not really God so you shouldn't determine what's created or what. I was arguing with somebody yesterday at a picnic outside about this very topic and they said you shouldn't ever do that because who are you to change somebody's thing? You take Advil when you have a headache, right? Why don't you just pray and thank God for your headache? Well, I mean, but that's just temporary. I said fine, when you have cancer why don't you just pray and thank God for the cancer but what we're supposed to be what we should be looking at altering are the problems that are currently in front of us and not just hypothetical problems in the future. So if it's somatic cells then it's at least an option that would be open to us to cure diseases. The second part of it and we've kind of touched on this This gets back to the designer baby idea. You and I must not use our technological powers to enhance our children or simply make them what we would like to be. This sounds like science fiction Have you ever seen the movie Gattaca? Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman? Yeah, I haven't seen that movie forever. I was actually thinking about watching that movie But in that movie you've got people like designers, human beings and all that kind of stuff It seems like science fiction but it's really not. It's very possible to express or suppress all kinds of things in human beings going forward. What's so bad about that? So every person that comes to you comes to you in such a way that you're the kind of person that you want to connect with. But what we're doing, we need to make sure that you're playing a certain thing and you've got that story Yeah, good. You're playing the role of God What else is wrong with it? Let's just be honest You might be an incredibly secure person If so, you're just kidding yourself We're already incredibly insecure as human beings Imagine if you were like What was I supposed to be? Is this who God made me to be? Or is this who my parents made me to be? Or am I supposed to be? Should I get shorter or something? What kind of person would I end up being were I not this kind of person? Good. Any other ideas? I've got a big one My biggest weakness with a simple act of observation is watching 8-year-olds play soccer If you've never been to a soccer game where 8-year-olds are playing soccer then your life is inevitably enriched because nothing comes good as a result of watching 8-year-olds play soccer However you will see people I'm one of them who lose their minds at the fact that the kids are just like all of them at the same time except the one kid who doesn't want to play who's just sitting in the corner He's the smart kid It's the worst experience Yeah, 6-year-olds are a lot more fun Yeah, because they don't really care But you still see parents like Come on, Timmy! Kick the ball, Timmy! Timmy, you're going the wrong way! Timmy, you're an idiot! You see parents go crazy on their kids They're like, just let them kick the ball They don't care Everybody gets a ribbon Whether you play it or not Brian Regan's got a great bit about playing baseball and how everybody gets a snow cone If you've never heard it, please look it up It's totally clean It is one of the funniest bits of comedy in the world because it's so true I don't care, I just get a snow cone They go crazy They're already trying to get their kids to be the best physical athletes humanly possible Everybody wants their kids to go pro Now imagine if you could make your child bigger, faster, and stronger This is seen today Let's make an army Stalin tried to do this He tried to create a race of superhumans It was a little different by pairing humans and apes in order to create a race of superhumans It's one of the sickest forms of human experimentation in the history of the world That's true in war and it's equally true on a football field This is such a possibility This is such a crazy possibility to make our kids bigger, faster, stronger, smarter that on the fringes of bioethical research there's people that are debating whether or not, should the day come and it's probably coming You can't have parents with child abuse who do not make their children the best they could possibly be Charge them in courts of law for child abuse because you're not giving your child every possible advantage and because your kid is going to be dumber than everybody else There's some kids over there in the corner and we're going to have to pay for those kids So yes, you should charge those humans with child abuse or the very real possibility of people themselves growing up understanding their parents didn't make them all they could be So, today we have wrongful death cases We have wrongful death cases We have wrongful death cases We have wrongful death cases We have wrongful death cases We have wrongful death cases We have wrongful death cases We have wrongful death cases We have wrongful death cases We have wrongful death cases The area is difficult because you and I each if you have children you do want the best for them, right? You want the best for your children Gilbert Mylander, a Roman Catholic bioethicist writes this Parents do of course have a responsibility within limits chiefly for now, the control of nurture rather than nature to carry out this task Those who doubt this need only to observe parents watching their children participate in school sports or applying to colleges We are very reluctant to let the mystery of personhood It's true to greater and lesser degrees of every parent in this room If you don't know that yet your kids are probably just a little too young But the reality is that we all shape our children into the kinds of beings we want them to be And some of us go about that in, let's be honest, some rather ridiculous Unfortunately, you'll only realize once your kids are grown and screwed up We already wrestle with it Every person wrestles with it, to some degree All my kids will be this You go, how did that happen? I don't want to ask for a show of hands but I'm curious how many of you were forced to play a musical instrument I don't care if you're tone deaf and you hate this and you cry every week Play the instrument! Same as the people on the football field Yours is just more like high arty or whatever Our children are, first and foremost neighbor, equal in dignity to our own and personhood develops as a mystery Therefore, we should avoid anything in order to just make them what we want them to be There's a vast difference between curing disease and just searching for perfection which we already want I have a question that comes to mind In doing things that help people that are, basically we're talking about people going beyond expecting to get all these data and really converting that and digging into that and going further than that Right The question at the end of this to close this down is What do we need to do? We need to cultivate the virtues of contentment and hope Both of those Everything else too, but primarily those two are the things that struck me as I was writing this this week Contentment in the fact that you and I need to be okay with things being the way they are forever if they never change If we're not, we're going to do anything humanly possible no matter how terrifying, sick, or wrong it is We have to be okay from the beginning to say, okay, I'm content in the way things are now Does contentment equal apathy and passivity? Yes or no? No, not at all Because I'm content now, I can work forward with possible hopes and if it never changes, I'm okay and if it does change, praise God God knows what He's doing and so we work forward in saying Okay, God, we're resting in you knowing that however messed up the situation seems to be to us and however difficult it is to deal with in the moment either for me or for my neighbor I'm going to believe that you know what you're doing which is not we sit back and pray and go God, please heal him and when the doctor goes, here's a way to heal him we don't go, I'm waiting on God There it is right there Possibly, so we should take those things into consideration and if we begin to be those kinds of people ourselves in every aspect of our lives people who are content and people who are hopeful then we will be able to come alongside people who are struggling and go, listen, here's the good news If I'm supposed to be content and hopeful why aren't you any of those things? If we are this way, then when these things come upon us or our neighbors, we will truly be able to help It's from these bases that you and I can truly engage in something as wonderfully possible as somatic cell modification in a healthy way without the desire to bow the knee to medicine and do whatever it takes to become perfect Let's pray God, it's so often the case even the existence of these kinds of things tends to blow our minds and we are left thinking what should we do? God, I pray that we would continually shape that question into a much more profound and answerable question to how should we be because we don't know what we should do and there's no way for any of us to answer the question what should we do in every scenario that could possibly exist in the future God, if we are the people that you desire us to be then we will be people who are likely to be the kinds of people who can answer these questions rightly and likely to be the kinds of people who can truly love our neighbors In Jesus' name we pray Amen