Ethical subsidiarity lets others do the dirty work

THOSE opposed to destructive research on living human embryos have reason to be aghast with the Government for misrepresenting the significance of last Monday’s vote at the EU council of ministers.

Before the vote, Minister Micheál Martin claimed he was defending “ethical subsidiarity”, a notion as incoherent as it is irrelevant to what was really at issue.

The controversy surrounding the vote was actually about whether EU taxpayers (including Irish taxpayers) should be forced to fund research that required the deliberate destruction of human embryos, under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).

Behind all the spin, Mr Martin consistently refused to join seven other EU countries opposed to the funding. Germany, Poland, Austria, Malta, Slovakia, Lithuania and Luxembourg objected to EU funding of embryo-destructive research, calling instead for increased funding for the ethically non-problematic, scientifically-promising adult stem cell research. Our Government took no such principled approach.

As a result, the outcome was most unsatisfactory. The council of ministers agreed to fund research on embryonic stem cells provided the embryos are first destroyed by non-EU-funded sources — ie, our money as taxpayers, may then lawfully be spent on research using those stem cells.

That is what “ethical subsidiarity” means in practice — others do the dirty work, destroying the embryos, then in our name, the EU proceeds to fund the research, hypocritically pretending our hands are clean, ignoring the destruction of human life that produced those stem cells.

Dr Audrey Dillon

Pro-Life Campaign

Gardiner Street Upper

Dublin 1