Roman Catholic Cardinal Alfonso Trujillo has announced that anyone who participates in research that involves the destruction of an embryo – specifically, stem-cell researchers – is liable to excommunication from the Catholic church. This is apparently an expansion of existing Catholic doctrine regarding abortion providers. (Trujillo, you may recall, is the clown who released a lengthy report, quickly demonstrated to be scientifically false in almost every respect, concluding that condoms do not help prevent AIDS.)How much impact the excommunication policy will have remains to be seen. Trujillo’s justification for it, however, is more worrisome.

Deliberately destroying embryos for research purposes, the prelate observed, “is equivalent to abortion.” The same penalty would apply, he said, since “it is the same action.”

Here he exhibits the same reasoning as that of American religious conservatives who obsess over IVF embryos, and who attempt to define pregnancy as beginning at conception rather than uterine implantation of the embryo. Like them, the Cardinal hoists himself upon his own petard by declaring the death of an embryo entirely outside any woman’s body to be “the same action” as the termination of a pregnancy taking place inside a woman.

Aside from the utter contempt for women that these attitudes display, there is the bizarre perspective on reproductive biology that they reveal. Pregnancy, by the religious right’s definition, has absolutely nothing to do with a woman or her body. A pregnancy is underway whether or not a woman is even involved. Pregnancy begins when the ovum is fertilized – which in IVF takes place entirely outside, probably many miles away from, the body of either the egg donor or the woman who may potentially carry the fetus to term. An abortion takes place when a pregnancy is terminated – which for an IVF embryo again encompasses no involvement of a woman’s body. Indeed, in the case of embryos created for research, a pregnancy and an abortion both take place – the religious right claims – even though there is not only no woman involved, but no woman even intended to be or potentially involved.

This would be simply asinine if the Catholic church, or the religious right generally, were held to even minimal standards of scientific fact and rational argumentation. For some reason, they never are, but that doesn’t mean that any of this makes sense.

[Trujillo] argued that reliance on scientific and technological progress had produced a “delirium,” with gravely harmful results for the life of society.

And it is on this bizarre appreciation of the facts of pregnancy and abortion – and of science across the board – that the church formulates policies regarding those who perform research on embryos.

UPDATE: On consideration, I realize that the above discussion may be somewhat unfair. The criticism on grounds of mischaracterizing pregnancy is valid only if the Cardinal is, in fact, declaring IVF embryos to be products of pregnancy. That is what I took his comment about destroying them to be “equivalent to abortion” to mean. However, afer reading other articles on this subject, I think it may be that he meant only that they are morally equivalent, not that they are identical in fact. If so, then my criticism of the Cardinal on that point is wrong; though many Protestants do make that identification, he may not have been doing so in this case.