How science turned our bodies into moral templates

Go to the mirror and take a long, hard look at that body of yours. Gone are the days when you thought it was a matter of "the headbone's connected to the neckbone, the neckbone's connected to the shoulderbone . . ."; now you have to deal with enzymes and stem cells and DNA and God knows what else. Our body is an organism that seems to grow more complex every day, as yet another scientist makes yet another ground-breaking discovery that leaves us more puzzled than before.

Scientific and medical progress has not only turned the human body into a mind-blowing physical entity, it has also transformed it into a moral template. A thousand ethical issues are couched in its sinews, a hundred dilemmas nestle in its folds. Witness the case of the Manchester Siamese twins. If the month-old Jodie and Mary are not separated, both will die within six months. If they are separated, Jodie will almost certainly live (although handicapped), but Mary will die. The girls' Catholic parents don't want to separate them: "that is not God's will", they say. Their Church, as Archbishop Cormac Murphy-O'Connor confirmed, upholds their stand. Their Church is mine - yet its teaching strikes me not only as cruel, but also confusing: morality is about intention, not just consequence. If the intention behind the separation is to save a child's life, rather than to kill her sister, then isn't it morally justified? For instance, the Church may forbid a pregnant mother to abort even if her life is threatened by childbirth; and yet it allows a pregnant cancer sufferer to have chemotherapy to save her own life, even though the treatment may kill the foetus.

But the case of the Siamese twins goes well beyond theological hair-splitting; whether their parents are Catholic or atheists, Buddhists or C of E, the twins put us all on the spot. Because, in law, their fate depends on the state and not the family; we are to judge who is to live and who is to die - or whether both should be condemned to a union that spells death.

It is because their dilemma is ours to solve that Mary and Jodie raise the alarm - and threaten moral panic. Far from reassuring us that medical advances have allowed us to take a giant step in preserving life and improving our lot - ten years ago, Jodie would have stood no chance of survival - the twins' case has dramatised how unprepared we are for these advances. Like Tony Bland, whose persistent vegetative state was brought to an end in 1993 when the law lords ruled that his parents could legally disconnect his feeding tubes, Mary and Jodie have unconsciously ignited ethical debates from pub to hairdresser's salon. They bring us face to face with 2,000-year-old questions - about the sanctity of life, the value we attach to handicapped people, and the rights of the state against those of parents in determining a child's lot.

The plight of the twins and of their parents (who came here from the Mediterranean to take advantage of the expertise at St Mary's Hospital, Manchester) reminds us that, as a society, we must reach some consensus on ethical questions. To fail to do so condemns Mary and Jodie to a legal limbo that will give way to death - and condemns us to living a contradiction, whereby the same people who attack George Bush Jr's record on capital punishment and Turkey's disregard of human rights clamour for the right to experiment on embryos and pull the plug on a life-support machine.

From the new anti-malarial vaccine that may save millions of lives in developing countries to the Lasik surgery that restores 20/20 vision to first-world square eyes, medical advances have ensured an extraordinary leap in our life expectancy, and in our expectations of the quality of that life. But the prospect before us is not an obstacle-free course, as Mary and Jodie tragically prove. Their extraordinary, conjoined body offers a flesh-and-blood symbol of the ethical minefield that is modern medicine. It also exposes our inability to defuse those mines.

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