Stem cell research has a lot of controversy due to the fact some years ago you could only get stem cells from embryos.
For some people (like the Catholic Church) that was a huge ethical issue.
Now it is not.
Research on adult stem cells or induced pluripotent stem cells already didn't face the same objections.
It sounds like this is more about an improvement in the technique of inducing pluripotency that could reduce negative complications, rather than a whole new unobjectionable procedure that hadn't existed before.
Thomas predates ESC research by centuries--quite a few of them, actually.
ESC research has always been problematic.
Yes, I am aware that Saint Thomas Aquinas was a medieval theologian and that embryonic stem cell research did not exist at the time.
Maybe you want to argue that there is some necessary connection between ESC research and the period of Church history where the development of Church moral doctrine treats life as beginning with conception. If so, great, argue that. Otherwise, “ESC research has always been problematic” is just a boring claim about the screamingly obvious. Because there are other potential moral or ethical frameworks within which you could evaluate ESC. Or perhaps you would say that those frameworks are not official Church doctrine, thus they’re not Catholic, even if they were taught by saints and Doctors of the Church. If so, you’re also probably the kind of person who says that someone who disagrees with the Church about the morality of contraception isn’t really Catholic, no matter what they say or do on Sundays. But then I congratulate you on erasing the vast majority of Catholics worldwide.
Thomas represented the best of Catholic theology for his time, but it would be monumentally ignorant to act like the Catholic Church is somehow still beholden to the the moral conclusions he drew from incomplete scientific understanding.
> Maybe you want to argue that there is some necessary connection between ESC research and the period of Church history where the development of Church moral doctrine treats life as beginning with conception.
Of course I do. The necessary connection is that that's when ESC was created. It couldn't have been created without the very developments in embryology that rendered Thomas' conclusions moot.
Talk about something so obvious it shouldn't need to be said.
I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t do that, then.