sordid isolation of Great Britain, The

Human Life Review, Summer 2001 by Johnson, Daniel

George W. Bush's visit to John Paul II this week was not a summit, but a pilgrimage. Perhaps "Castelgandolfo" will enter history, as "Canossa" did a thousand years ago. Just as the Emperor Henry IV submitted to Pope Gregory VII, so the President deferred to the Pope, the temporal lord to the spiritual. For half an hour, the most powerful person in the world looked like the junior partner of the man he addressed, quite sincerely, as "Holy Father." Mr. Bush recognised the fact that, though the Pope has no divisions, the modern world is ruled not by armies but by words.

Did they talk about peace? Poverty? Pollution? No: the subject that weighed most heavily on their consciences was stem-cell research. President Bush is agonising about whether to keep his campaign pledge to deny federal funds for experiments which involve the creation, "harvesting" and destruction of embryos. Such research includes "therapeutic" human cloning, from which scientists promise to create human "spare parts" and to cure degenerative diseases, but which the Pope condemns as an "evil" comparable to euthanasia and infanticide. So sensitive is this issue in the United States that it could set the tone for the entire Bush presidency. As I write, Congress looks likely to pass a Bill to ban the creation of embryos by cloning. Mr. Bush is said to support the Bill.

In recent months, several distinguished American visitors have impressed me with the emphasis they place upon bioethical issues. George Weigel, the biographer of John Paul II, told me that the absurd faith vested in genetic research is a phenomenon of secularised religion, with its promise of "miracle cures," the deification of the scientist, and the indefinite postponement of death. "This is the immortality project," he said. This conviction is shared by American Jews as well as Catholics. Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb, the founders and leading voices of neo-conservatism, told me that they see this field as "the politics of the future."

It is a measure of how seriously the President takes "the culture of life" that he has even adopted the idiom of the Pope whose "profound" views he respects even when they disagree. Indeed, Mr. Bush makes a point of visiting Catholic prelates wherever he travels in the United States. Yet the President, remember, is not a Catholic, but an evangelical Methodist.

Tony Blair, by contrast, is an Anglican, perhaps even-as his biographer John Sopel suggests-a crypto-Catholic. Yet it is almost inconceivable that the Prime Minister would have made such a pilgrimage to sit at the feet of an octogenarian pope-especially one of John Paul II's uncompromising orthodoxy-to listen to his warnings against stem cell research. Mr. Blair is just not interested in anything that a supreme pontiff might have to say about the mass destruction of human embryos. Mr. Blair does not even realise that he has just given the green light to the genetic modification of Homo sapiens.

Britain is the first country in the world explicitly to legalise the "therapeutic" cloning of human embryos, just as we were among the first to legalise abortion. This momentous step was not even accorded the dignity of an Act of Parliament, but was smuggled through as an amendment to a statutory instrument, without proper debate. Having rammed it through the Commons last December and the Lords in January, Mr. Blair was quite indifferent to the dismay it provoked throughout Europe and America. While the British media took their cue from the government's pretence that this was a mere clarification of the law, the rest of the world rightly saw this small step for genetics as a giant leap towards the dehumanising of mankind.

While most British newspapers relegated the story to the inside pages, it dominated the front page of Germany's heavyweight broadsheet, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Britain was widely accused of excluding herself from European civilisation. Reaction in the United States was no less vehement; and, in France, President Chirac immediately assured his countrymen that France would not follow Britain's lead and called for an international ban on all human cloning; last month the French government proposed a ban on human cloning "for research purposes." Even the Dutch, who have legalised euthanasia, have no plans to follow Britain's example.

Of course, there were those who approved. Severino Antinori, the maverick Italian professor who has promised to clone human babies for infertile couples, was among those who praised to the skies "Tony Blair's intelligent decision."

Those respectable scientists who have already cloned animals, and who know the terrible abnormalities it is almost certain to engender in the few cloned foetuses that do not spontaneously abort, agree with the leading American expert Professor Rudolf Jaenisch in condemning human cloning as "an outrageous criminal enterprise to even attempt." The British Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority joined in the chorus, but Professor Antinori is correct in supposing that the Prime Minister's advocacy of therapeutic cloning has helped to legitimise reproductive cloning.