Tomorrow is “Sanctity of Life Sunday”, the day when across our nation Christians and churches will pray for an end to the many things that war against human life.

In our climate of increasingly complex biotechnology, there are a lot of boundaries being pushed. There are more Christians in recent years who don’t have a problem with embryonic stem cell therapy “if it helps someone.” Maybe it doesn’t occur to them that one of the first “life-saving” therapies created with a dead fetus is a skin cream? No, I’m not making that up, though I wish I were. It’s called Neocutis.

Is this really the “nobel cause” for which our culture is turing human life into a commodity? FEWER WRINKLES?? Frankly it makes my stomach turn just writing this. They’ve tried to reassure the public in numerous ways that fall flat. Things to the effect of: “But we only used ONE terminated fetus!” “But it started out for burn victims and then we found out it helps WRINKLES!” Oh, and don’t get me started on how much money they are making off the life they turned into a commodity–this stuff is pricy.

I’ll take crow’s feet any day, thank you very much.

More and more people, even in the church, are pursuing ethically problematic means of reproduction. By the way, note the difference here between the use of the word “reproduction” (like an assembly line)–the word typically used within the medical community for the range of services including IVF, called “reproductive technologies , and the fading use of the word procreation, which seems to insinuate even within the word that there is something being created.

So many people have frozen their embryos that there are literally hundreds of thousands of what some term “extra” embryos in fertility centers in our country alone. And yes, you can actually adopt them. We offered a free speaker from this life-honoring group to the OB-Gyn student interest group at a local medical school. But apparently talk of “adopting” in the same sentence as the word ”embryo” is much too controversial for them. Nevermind that they can train in abortion if they so choose.

When we ponder the incarnation, we realize that from the first moment that Mary was pregnant, she had within her a being that was diven yet human. The tiny cell had two sets of DNA, and even then had the distinct identity of Christ, even causing his cousin to jump when they “met” in utero. It is our creation Imageo Dei , and the act of the incarnation of Christ in our flesh that endowed on our human race sanctity. But he did not suddenly inhabit a baby at birth–he was incarnate in the conception, in the earliest stages of developement, before even that fertilized egg divided into two cells. He bestowed even the earliest stage of humanity with dignity.

Probably my favorite Bioethics book currently is Bioethics: A Primer for Christians by Gilbert Meilaender. In one of the early chapters, he has a lot to say about Bioethics in general, and how a Christian should think about these complex issues.

The never-ending project of human self-creation runs up against the limit that is God. It will always be hard to state in advance the precise boundaries that ought to limit our freedom, but we must be prepared to look for them. We must be prepared to acknowledge that there may be suffering we are free to end but ought not, that there are children who might be produced through artificial means but ought not, that there is valuable knowledge that might be gained through use of unconsenting research subjects but ought not.                                                                                                   -page 5

I agree with him in the fact that is is not acceptable for us to blindly oppose the forward progress of medicine. Rather, we should fight disease with all of our minds’ might, following Christ’s charge to “heal the sick” (Matt 10:8).  Yet we must acknowledge God has a sovereign purpose in suffering that we cannot understand any better than Job. There are lines we ought not cross in the relief of human suffering, specifically, lines that involve the wronging of human life. As Meileander concludes his Primer he writes:

This need not and should not mean a rejection of the penultimate healing that scientific and clinical medicine offer us. The best physicians know, however, that their art at its highest must cooperate with powers beyond their own. We should give them our respect and our gratitude, but not our devotion–and they, of course, should seek no more. Instead we place our ultimate hopes for Health and Wholeness in the God who himself has been broken by death–and who nevertheless lives.             -page 124