Posted on 08/02/2005 10:14:44 PM PDT by Crackingham
We like to think that the stem-cell controversy will, some time before mankind's end, give us definitions we can act thoughtfully upon. We need not only verbal definitions but moral perspectives. These are thought to be static, but are not. Probably Harry Truman would not today drop a nuclear bomb on Pyongyang, though doing so might have got him a runaway reelection the next day. Matthew Scully, in his book, Dominion, has reopened the moral question of animal (mis)treatment. Ever the descendants of the Vikings, Scandinavian explorers are pressing new definitions of acceptable voluntary death.
In the matter of the stem cells, we are asked to focus on two completely different things. There are the so-called adult stem cells, which derive from cells that would never develop in a human being. To take such stem cells and do nuclear transfer research is okay. Nobody is arguing that what you are doing is snuffing out a human life.
By contrast, embryonic stem cells harbor life unborn, so that to take these and experiment with them is seen as experimentation with human beings. The ideal is to authorize the first kind of stem-cell research but to forbid the second — or, at least, to restrain it.
Now here is where confusion begins.
President Bush had said that we must not encourage the termination of life even for the sake of saving life. The premise of his line of reasoning is that to destroy an embryo in order to extract its stem cells is the equivalent of abortion.
But Mr. Bush began the dispute when in 2001 he gave his approval to the use by biologists of 78 embryonic-stem-cell lines already in existence, while decreeing that this would be the end of any public subsidy to the creation of further lines. But the House has now voted (238-194) to approve additional subsidies for research on in vitro embryos donated by fertilization clinics. The Senate Majority Leader, Dr. Bill Frist, has endorsed this bill, and President Bush has promised to veto if it reaches his desk.
The moral confusions spring in part from the isolation from one another of the nation's laws and practices. In some states, stem-cell researchers can do certain things which in other states are forbidden.
Add to this that the president's argument has had mostly to do with the use of public funds, but the language used has had to do with universals. If the destruction of an embryo is the destruction of a human life, how do we explain the inattention given to such destruction of life in so many states?
Perfectly said. You would expect that those who share the president's position on embryonic life would support a total ban on human embryo experimentation, public or private. I would think that they would see it as a humanitarian imperative.
Of course the odds of a total ban getting through Congress (much less getting upheld by the Courts) are somewhere between zero and none.
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