The ultimate slavery

EDWIN CUSSEN (Irish Examiner letters, Dec 10) “cannot comprehend why a hierarchical coterie should pressurise the Government to reject well-resourced stem cell research”.

Here’s why.

When four, or 24, human ova are fertilised on a petri-dish, each one becomes a new human being. This is a matter of scientific fact, which is accepted by the Catholic Church. The Church is under a divine edict to defend the life of each of these new human beings. In his book Society and Sanity, Frank Sheed wrote that slavery will have reached the extreme, below which there are no further depths, “when it is upon another’s being”. Whatever its promised benefits, destructive embryonic stem cell research represents the ultimate slavery.