FRANKFURT. As the Christian Democratic Union struggles to get a grip on the controversies of biotechnology, an issue that has sharply divided the party, Alliance 90_The Greens are sensing a historic opportunity to revive their emaciated reserves.
"I believe that biotechnology will be the new big issue for us," said Antje Vollmer, a member of the Greens and vice president of the Bundestag, Germany's parliament. "On this question, the Greens will be close to the position of the Catholic Church."
With the CDU apparently overtaxed and split by biopolitics, Andrea Fischer, the former Green health minister, has called for a "strategic partnership" on embryo protection between her party and the Christian churches.
Meanwhile, Berlin Cardinal Georg Sterzinsky has said that the Catholic Church could no longer regard the CDU as "its party." In fact, he saw "more areas of agreement" with the Greens, and not just on the issue of protecting unborn life.
Cardinal Sterzinsky is not closing the door on his church's historic partnership with the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union. He is merely describing a reality that already exists, and that has become all the more apparent in the current discussion on genetic technology and reproductive medicine.
All of the CDU's lively chatter at present does nothing to dispel the notion that the normative claims of the "Christian" party are no more than attempts to put itself on the map on these delicate issues. How many people in the CDU are willing or able to insist on the difference between ethical judgment and political maneuvering -- like the leader of the party's parliamentary group, Friedrich Merz?
If we claim that a human life worthy of protection begins at conception, and if we therefore reject research exploiting embryos, we cannot simultaneously allow the selective procedure of preimplantation diagnostics -- no matter what kind of limits may be established were the procedure legalized.
Mr. Merz is completely right to insist that no credible or sophisticated position can deny the connection. President Johannes Rau's recent speech on biopolitics was successful because it did not attempt to separate things that clearly belong together. By comparison, the CDU_CSU are merely offering ad hoc constructions.
Wolfgang Schäuble's private theological essay was especially astonishing. With his finding that the Bible actually supports exploiting embryos for research purposes, Mr. Schäuble, the former CDU chairman, dispensed with cloying religious scruples and in effect allowed us to applaud the destruction of embryonic human life.
Commenting on Mr. Schäuble's views, Ijoma Mangold of the Berliner Zeitung recently wrote: "If a mind as sharp as Wolfgang Schäuble's can veer off into such patent idiocy, then the intellectual helplessness of his party -- which he hopes to cover up -- must present a dreadful and deep abyss."
The CDU cannot avoid the insight that the prohibition on research with embryonic stem cells -- recently reaffirmed by the German Physicians Conference -- must necessarily also apply to embryos that are "left over" from the process of in-vitro fertilization.
By reducing taboos to mere regulations, we are looking for further incentives to ignore all prohibitions and encouraging more loopholes -- for example, through the device of preimplantation diagnostics. "We cannot afford to set up choices between false alternatives in this discussion," Angela Merkel, the CDU's chairwoman, said last week, accusing Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of invoking "bogus alternatives" (human dignity versus jobs, for example). On no other issue are the CDU's attempts to formulate oppositional ideas designed to implode as effectively as in biopolitics.
By attacking Mr. Schröder, Ms. Merkel invokes a "false alternative": "The CDU has a very clear position, and it proceeds from the inviolability of human dignity." In the next sentence, she defines exactly where it all "leads": "Although some have different views on particular questions, it is still true that they also feel an obligation to uphold the dignity of human beings."
Since the dispute now revolves around "particular questions," the supposedly inviolable human dignity may be divided after all into those who refuse to place a price tag on an embryo and those who would see it as an item in a cost-benefit analysis. How can a clear position on biopolitics be formulated when the party chairwoman is working toward a split?
Every time the CDU fails to take a position on bioethics, it loses more of its Christian or "C" bonus. If the CDU leaves the church-advocated position to the Greens, it will reveal that its rhetoric of "values" is a highly mobile set of views that do not apply to "particular questions."
On Monday, the CDU presidiumdiscussed a position paper by Jürgen Rüttgers, the national party's deputy chairman and its leader in North Rhine-Westphalia, that would allow preimplantation diagnostics -- within strict limits, of course. Although the party leadership approved his paper, it said that further debates were necessary in the coming months.
At a congress on "Medicine and Conscience" in Erlangen last week, molecular biologist Regine Kollek again pointed out that there are no objective criteria for defining a serious inherited disease. That is why supporters of preimplantation diagnostics refuse to present a binding list. Ms. Kollek, who is a member of Mr. Schröder's recently appointed National Ethics Council, said that experience in other countries has proven that limits on preimplantation diagnostics will be violated sooner or later. In Britain, she said, embryos with treatable diseases are not being implanted. In Belgium, possible sterility suffices as a reason not to implant. By contrast, the Rüttgers paper argues that preimplantation diagnostics is an automatic consequence of in-vitro fertilization. If that is true, however, must we follow the logic of "Since we allowed this, we must therefore also allow that?" Can we not argue the reverse? Should we not recognize the reprehensibility of an established method now that we better understand its possible (societal) consequences? How else can we counter the genetic lobby's cheap strategy by which the future is wrapped in the past and then smuggled into the present as something familiar?
Mr. Rüttgers dismisses such considerations and replaces them with a nominal rhetoric of values. Just before arguing in favor of preimplantation diagnostics, his position paper apes an exemplary moral outrage: "We once again witness people voting openly against the birth of children with inherited handicaps. A supposedly humane argument is made that no one should be forced to love and support a child that will never have a hope of success. According to some predictions, the coming decades will see a consensus that ending the lives of genetically defective fetuses is morally justifiable and in fact appropriate."
But why does Mr. Rüttgers talk of future decades? He himself wants to establish today the very consensus he claims to condemn. Just a few lines further, his paper makes a supposedly humane argument for preimplantation diagnostics -- for a procedure that, in the words of Justice Minister Herta Däubler-Gmelin, "is not at all a diagnosis with the goal of healing, but a way of eliminating genetically conspicuous or burdened embryos, meaning genetic selection." Calls for "greater sophistication" in the discussion are merely the attempt to paper over the reality of eugenics, as portrayed in the Rüttgers paper, which euphemistically describes preimplantation diagnostics as "expanding the spectrum of prenatal diagnostics."
By defining preimplantation diagnostics as the "examination" of an embryo, he conceals that preimplantation diagnostics has the sole intent of ending the life of a genetically damaged fetuses. Worse, a bogus argument is put forward that a ban on preimplantation diagnostics effectively "forces" women to implant damaged embryos.
That is entirely Mr. Rüttgers' construct. As long as there is a ban on preimplantation diagnostics, no one will be able to identify an embryo as "damaged," and so no one could be forced to implant one. A couple will always be free to decide whether they wish to accept the risk of giving birth to a sick child in the hope of giving birth to a healthy one.
The idea that a later abortion might be prevented if we allow an earlier selection only makes sense if we believe that the right to life starts at zero and grows gradually in the womb -- a premise that Mr. Rüttgers explicitly condemns in his paper.
May 28, 2001
© Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 2001