I was particularly interested in the news yesterday that scientists at Newcastle University have been able to replace the nucleus of one women’s egg with the nucleus from another egg to stop a child being born with mitochondrial disease. This is a disease affecting one child in 6,500, which can result in blindness, heart failure and other serious conditions. For six years, until the beginning of this year, I had the privilege of being on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, and this was one of the many difficult issues that we had to decide about. Indeed, our decision to allow research in this area was challenged right up to the highest court in the land.
These are indeed contentious issues, but I think it is important first to be clear about what we mean by the much used word “natural”. It is not natural to us simply to let nature take its course. What is natural for us as human beings is to use our God given brains to interact with nature for human wellbeing….
It surely is important to know what one means when using the word “natural” given that it has so many connotations. In fact doesn’t Lord Harries shift between a telelogical sense of natural – namely that human beings are by nature reasoning animals, and a non-teleological sense – namely that human beings have, in fact, cut down trees, build roads and cities and so forth such as to reshape the landscape.
It is the former sense that is key to the RC argument about human nature. Yet it is the latter sense that Lord Harries uses to argue that since, in fact, many embryos never make it to birth all that reproductive technology does is “aid nature”. One might as well argue that since all human beings, in fact, “naturally” die – all that killing selected human beings would do is “aid nature”.