Very Interesting Piece by John Allen

Published on National Catholic Reporter Conversation Cafe (http://ncrcafe.org)       

Right and left join forces to oppose brave new world of biotechnology   

By John L Allen Jr Weekly
Created Feb 9 2007 - 09:25

For some time, the politics of bioethics in the West has fueled deep ideological polarization between a permissive left and a restrictive right. That was the dynamic when the front-burner issues were abortion and birth control, and it's still true of today's most agonizing debates, such as embryonic stem cell research and end-of-life questions such as those surrounding the Terry Schiavo case in Florida.

On every one of those issues, the knee-jerk response of the left is to let people make their own decisions, while that of the right is to defend life. This fault line forms the core of today's "culture wars."

The primary consequence for the Catholic church has been to drive it into an ever-tighter alliance with the political right, a trend clearly in evidence during the 2004 presidential elections in the United States. This is notoriously frustrating for "seamless garment" Catholics, who insist that if you take into view the full range of the church's moral and social teaching, it cannot be subsumed into any secular ideological formation.

But what if we project forward 10 to 20 years, trying to anticipate what the front-line bioethical debates will be then? Looking at what's happening in the biological sciences, such questions may include cloning, life-extension treatments, the creation of transgenic entities such as chimeras, the use of genetic technology to "engineer" offspring with desirable intellectual and physical capacities, and the widespread use of genetically modified foods.

If that's the future, one surprising consequence is that today's ideological divisions may become much less clear-cut, as opposition to the brave new world of biotechnology will stem as much from the left as the right.

This reality is already crystal-clear in Europe, where the use of genetically modified foods has basically been stopped in its tracks -- by the political left, not the right. The same phenomenon is in evidence in the Catholic church, where the most vehement opposition to GMOs has come from the bishops' conferences of the developing world, often in tandem with theologians and members of religious communities who would generally be considered "liberal" on most political matters.

[To read the whole piece, which is very interesting, click here.]