Group seeks to help churches address bioethics issues
5/14/2003 WASHINGTON
(UMNS) - A working group of the World Council of Churches plans to carry
several recommendations on bioethics to the organization's Central
Committee in Geneva this summer.
The working group would like to
see the WCC encourage attention to "upstream questions," said Martin
Robra, the council executive who works with the bioethics issue. Robra
spoke at the end of the working group's May 10-13 meeting, hosted by the
United Methodist Board of Church and Society. The United Methodist
Church is a member and major supporter of the council.
Upstream
questions are not concerned with what to do about cloning or embryonic
stem cell research, Robra explained. Those are "midstream questions,"
and they tend to dominate most of churches' discussions on genetics, he
said. Rather, the working group seeks a discussion of "What has brought
us here and what did we learn?" he said.
"What is the specific contribution that has to come from churches?" he asked.
The
working group hopes the WCC and its member churches will focus on
mapping the debate rather than doing the scientific exploration of the
topics, he said. The Central Committee will meet Aug. 25-Sept. 2.
"What
is the problem and who defines it?" he asked. Technological and
sociological viewpoints vie for dominance in thinking about genetics, he
observed. The technological approach tends to isolate a problem and go
for a simple cure, but it ignores the context of the problem. Rarely
does an effect have a single cause, he added.
Alternatives require seeing an issue in context, he declared.
Lopeti
Senituli, a member of the working group and director of the Human
Rights and Democracy Movement in Tonga, told of that South Pacific
island nation's experience a few years ago.
In 2000, an
Australian firm named Autogen announced that it had signed an agreement
with the Tongan minister of health to do a study of Tongans' DNA. The
focus was on type II diabetes, also known as adult-onset diabetes. At
the time, 14 percent of the adult population had this form of diabetes.
"Basically
all negotiation was done in secret," Senituli said. The company claimed
it would build a research facility, provide research grants and share
any product developed with the Tongan people free of charge.
The
Tongan Council of Churches was the first group to ask why the issue had
not been discussed in the parliament, he said. The council also
received assistance from the WCC in finding a way to inform religious
leaders of other Pacific nations about what was happening. The WCC
funded a workshop in 2001 and brought together experts from Germany and
the United States, theologians from the Pacific region and Tongan legal
experts.
"As a result of that workshop, the Tongan National
Council of Churches was ready to confront the Tongan government and
Autogen on not only theological grounds but also in terms of scientific
knowledge as to why the Autogen research proposal should not be
accepted," Senituli recalled.
The council of churches believed
that research should not include changes that would be impossible to
monitor closely, he said. Since the research aimed to identify and alter
the gene related to diabetes, any genetic modifications would affect
future generations, he said.
People also felt revulsion for the
idea that someone could own part of someone else's body, he added. "The
human person is God's creation," and the Tongans could not accept a
"commodification" of people or their parts, he said.
"We're very
concerned about the 14 percent of the Tongan population who suffer from
diabetes," he said. The council was challenged for objecting to research
that could lead to a cure, but the group responded that the "cure" was
questionable and not certain.
"Type II diabetes is a lifestyle
disease," Senituli asserted. The cure is preventive care involving
changing dietary habits and increasing exercise, he said. He credited
the ministry of health with doing a good job of education about this.
Autogen withdrew in light of the opposition it encountered.
In
the case of Tonga, Robra noted, an Australian company was acting for
the French subsidiary of Merck, a German pharmaceutical company. Such
complex relationships, coupled with the opportunities to sell properties
or go out of business, make legal and financial liability extremely
difficult to pursue.
"Churches are confronted with a variety of justice issues," he remarked.
Some
of the examples he cited include prenatal diagnostics that could be
used for "negative selection" or aborting certain types of babies;
discrimination resulting from people with disabilities being seen as
defective or inferior beings; commodification of children; and
exploitation of individuals and groups through patenting.
"It's a
question of the trajectory of our culture," Robra said. Is it a
community of caring or an individual fix - "health as nurture versus
health as product (a technological fix)?" Perhaps society overemphasizes
the technological fix and forgets "health as nurture" in the context of
a caring community, he theorized.
The working group's
recommendations for WCC member churches include establishing an
ecumenical network by which the churches could share information on such
issues as bio-piracy. Bio-piracy refers to an organization, such as a
company, seeking an agreement with a group or individuals to use their
cells, DNA or blood to develop a medicine or therapy that becomes a
patent-protected product of that corporation, Robra said. The "donors"
may get a little care or compensation, but the profit and ownership
rests with a far removed corporate entity, he said.
"Our task is
to somehow create an ecumenical platform to exchange information and
respond," Robra said. Other recommendations developed by the group
include continuing the working group, holding a bioethics seminar in
2004 and a larger conference the same year, and releasing a study
document in 2005.
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