You may recall the movie “Alive.”  It was about a group of Uruguayan soccer players whose plane crashed in the Andes.  A number of them died.  Those who survived did so by devouring the flesh of the dead.  They did this only after great and solemn debate.  They ate only the flesh of people who had already died and would not have killed anyone in order to eat  their flesh.  All of the people in question were Catholic and they attended a Catholic college.  When the survivors returned to civilization, officials of the Church said that they had done nothing wrong.  From what I can understand, the position of the Church is that one may permissibly eat anything in extremis.  You may not kill people in order to devour their flesh, but eating the flesh of those who have already died is permissible.  In extremis, this is not inconsistent with the necessary respect we owe the dead.  The people in the Andes respected their dead comrades.  When two of them reached civilization, they buried the human flesh they had brought with them as rations.  At the same time, one student refused to eat the flesh given him and starved.  The Church officials said that he did not die of suicide.  This was a case of double effect; he intended to refrain from cannibalism, not to kill himself.  He could have eaten the flesh morally, but he was not obliged to do so. 

Some have sought to defend medical cannibalism in similar terms.  The idea is that as long as one does not participate in or approve of the killing of embryos, one may legitimately use their stem cells or vaccines made from the embryos.  They say that this is analogous to the cannibalism practiced in the Andes.  This supposedly shoots down the common objection that embryonic stem cell research is ”medical” cannibalism.  The people in the Andes did not kill the people whose bodies they ate, but they did eat the flesh once the person died.  The argument goes that so long as we do not participate in abortion we may still prosper from it. 

I counter:  the problem with stem cell research, etc., is not cannibalism per se but the fact that the cannibalism does not take place in extremis.  In the Andes, the people were facing starvation.  For everyone on that mountain the alternative to cannibalism was imminent death, a choice that at least one person made.  They used the dead human flesh as something that everyone needs in order to live — food.  Like air and water, food is an ordinary requirement for life.  Stem cell research and vaccine research does not produce food without which any person would die.  *At best* they might produce one particular type of potential treatment for diseases and disorders for which a variety of other treatments are available or might be if we pursued an alternative line of research.  There are alternatives available which were not available on that mountain.  I therefore highly doubt whether we can legitimately compare the pressing imperative of the Uruguayan students to eat with the desire of a Parkinson’s sufferer to combat the effects of his disease over the course of years.  This is entirely apart from the immorality of abortion and the question of tacit participation in murder after the fact.  The relevant criteria that rendered the Andean cannibalism permissible are absent from medical experimentation.