Muddy Vision

Glenn Reynolds quotes as follows from an article about a developing medical procedure:

Three years ago Elisabeth Bryant believed she would be blind for the rest of her life. “I couldn’t see anything,” she says. Now, although her vision is not perfect, she can see well enough to read, play computer games and check emails.

Bryant has retinitis pigmentosa, an eye disease that has blinded four generations of her family. What has saved the sight in one of her eyes is a transplant of a sheet of retinal cells. The vision in this eye has improved from 20:800 to 20:84 in the two-and-a-half years since the transplant – a remarkable transformation. . . .

There is a catch, of course. The sheets of retinal cells used by the team are harvested from aborted fetuses, which some people find objectionable.

Professor Reynolds seems to believe that this undermines certain pro-lifers' debate points, although his source doesn't follow the blog etiquette to provide at least one example of a so-called "It's not as though fetal tissue grafts are really medically promising" argument. (The link that Colby Cosh provides on that quotation actually goes to the above-quoted article.) Personally, I find the paragraph following the blockquote to be the most relevant, both to the moral issues and to Cosh and Reynolds's reaction:

One accusation of those opposed to using fetal tissue is that women might be tempted to have abortions to provide tissue to restore their own sight or that of relatives. "People are going to claim that we are promoting abortion," says Norman Radtke, the surgeon who carried out the transplants at the Norton Audubon Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky.

When it comes to medical technology, of one thing we can be sure: the next one hundred years will present us with plenty of situations in which we must decide whether desirable ends justify immoral means. As emotionally difficult as it will be to insist that some radiant paths must be left untrodden, we must acknowledge, now, that blindness to moral demands is a degenerative disease.