bump ping
while you're resting between posts.
;-)
(Migraine headache, can't sleep, might as well FReep.)
Below is the fourth edition of the essay, polished as much as I care to do it. We did this with the 'letters to the editor' project for the 2000 election, let's give this a try, to stop embryonic stem cell and cloning efforts that conceive individual human life for body parts.
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Time For Moderate Acceptance Has Passed
Aren’t most Americans moderate in their views, falling somewhere in the middle on the issue of abortion?
Yes, the acceptance quotient for the vast majority of Americans falls somewhere between the notions of ‘legal protection for all conceived individual human life’ and ‘legal protection for partial birth abortion’. I was once somewhere between the two ‘extremes’, but the truth offered from persons who had dug deeper into the science and issues regarding nascent human life awakened me from my comfortable slumber. The realization that awakened my brain was that ‘with tacit acceptance of in vitro fertilization and then the apparent necessity for some abortion, our society too quickly arrived at acceptance of, no, DEFENSE OF, infanticide.’ Apparently, the retired Democrat Senator from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has had a similar epiphany, since he has characterized partial birth abortion as infanticide.
After thirty years of 'somewhere in the middle', legalized abortion has lead directly to the maximum cheapening of individual human life. We have Americans defending infanticide for convenience and profit. But is that really the maximum corruption of our founding principles regarding the unalienable right to life? Perhaps we can and will degenerate further. Let’s explore such a probability.
A straight-line course from our current inhumane reality will have us embracing actors in Hollywood who insinuate that ‘exploitation of embryonic life is needed to bolster unencumbered lives of worthy pursuit’ … a notion made palpable by deranged feminists and their political champions who have insisted that in order to be 'fully empowered' a woman must have a legal right to commit violence upon her conceived children. Because of our tacit acceptance for the extreme treatment of individual prenatal life --forceful withdrawal of life support, abortion-- it is assumed by the societal engineers that we will accept conception of individual human lives and then killing those individuals for their body parts. That’s cannibalism.
Stricken Hollywood actors and power-crazed politicians, in order to convince you that exploitation of individual embryonic life is right, must arrange your tacit agreement that killing and harvesting embryos is not the same as killing an individual. But the scientists they would employ and fund with your taxes, to carry out this medical marvel, already know the truth. Here's the key to their reasoning: those seeking your tacit acceptance of embryonic exploitation must have you first agree to a blatant lie ... or worse, have you agree that these are individual human lives being exploited in earliest stage of their less worthy life, defining a higher purpose for these embryonic individuals, to sustain others who were not stripped of life support to harvest their body parts. The first level of agreement --that embryos are not individual humans-- is based on a calculated lie; the second descending level of agreement is acceptance of cannibalism based on that same specious axiom that embryos are not human individuals existing in the normal stage of a human lifetime.
[You might leave a portion out --from star to star-- if you're placing under your name.] *Regarding the specious arguments of nihilist, I've given up addressing directly the bloviations of leftist dead-souls. Instead,* permit me to elucidate the slippery slope many faithful people warned of way back when the outrage over in vitro fertilization was squelched ... a downward slope upon which we are now accelerating.
We’ve lost our hold on the goodness of supporting life (the humane necessity of life support). Now, exploitation of nascent life is a reality: the fetal tissue harvesting industry, with more than a billion dollars in business receipts each year, already influences when a woman ought to have the abortion she seeks because fetal tissue differentiation makes ‘later rather than earlier’ killing and harvesting of the fetus more desirable to those who will profit from the killing. But that's just the beginning of the horror: 1) embryonic stem cell exploitation now demands the conception and killing of untold numbers of embryos; 2) therapeutic cloning is based on the in vitro fertilization/conception of human life, with killing and harvesting as the goal when the embryo has differentiated sufficiently to make specific target-cell identification reliable. Both of these 'scientific advances' require our nation to accept the specious notion that an individual human life doesn't begin with at least first cell division (onset of mitosis).
Having read this far, some will insist, “But an embryo in a petri dish is not the same as an implanted embryo, not the same as a fetus, not the same as a born child, not the same as … “, yet the very science now hurrying to exploit embryonic life is convinced an embryo IS an individual human lifetime begun. “Outrageous assertion”, some will say. Okay, let the goals of their scientific pursuit speak for the scientists.
First, let us examine the goal of in vitro fertilization. In this procedure, a female gamete is fertilized by a male gamete (gametes are the ‘sex cells’ of the adult male or female). Once cell division is evidenced and the embryo reaches a desired number of body parts (the embryonic stem cells), the individual embryo is placed into the uterus of the target woman (and in most cases, several individual embryos are implanted at the same time, ‘running the odds’ so to speak; if too many achieve life support, the attending medical personnel will advise on aborting one or more, to improve the odds for the escaping survivor).
The technician watching the product of fertilization (the conceptus) in the ‘petri dish’ is looking for cell division, to assure that an individual life has begun to express itself, to grow … the technician implants only the embryo proven to be building her or his individual body!
Additionally, the technician must achieve this transfer from petri dish to human uterus at a specific stage in cell division, a specific stage in the lifetime already begun in a dish; if they try implanting too early, the embryo will not have the sticky coating it creates which allows for attachment to the uterine wall. Timing is crucial, timing that is based on proven growth processes of an individual human being's continuum of life. [If you’re wondering, this continuum concept of individual human existence is the exact same reasoning regarding the onset of puberty, for example, as a normal stage in individual human lifetime. Yes, the scientist views individual human life as a continuum, having a beginning at conception and first cell division, and continuing through a myriad of differentiations and organ expressions that could last for decades.]
Let us turn now to cloning, for the methodology of a technician seeking embryonic stem cells or a technician seeking to clone life has much in common with the in vitro fertilization process.
The clone is a genetic duplicate of a parent DNA donor. The in vitro fertilization technician conceives by bringing male and female gametes together, thus achieving the contribution of 23 chromosomes from female and 23 chromosomes from male, resulting in a conceptus having the normal 46 chromosomes. With similar goal of a conceptus in mind, the clone technician seeks to use a mature female gamete from which the chromosomal nuclear ball has been removed and the 46 chromosome nuclear material of the ‘adult donor’ is inserted. [‘Adult donor’ refers to an organism with a normal compliment of 46 chromosomes, not to the age of the donor. In some procedures, the product of male/female conception is stripped of the 46 resulting chromosomes prior to first cell division, and the 46 chromosomes of the donor are inserted.]
If the cloning technician seeks to fully reproduce the genetic donor, the conceptus is observed for evidence of cell division, then, just as with in vitro fertilization reproduction, the embryo is inserted into a woman’s uterus for continued life support … life support for a proven individual human being that is a genetic duplicate of the donor, with none of the ovum donor’s chromosomes. [There is ‘from-the-female’ DNA material in the de-nucleated ovum, associated with the mitochondria units of the ovum, but developmental characteristics of the newly conceived individual will follow the parent chromosomal route throughout growth and development. This is the complicated ‘stuff’ too rigorous for discussion in a short essay.]
If, instead of reproduction for a fully expressed parent donor, the technician desires ‘therapeutic cloning’, the embryo is not implanted in a woman’s life supporting body. Instead, life support is provided in the petri dish until a desired stage of cell differentiation is achieved. Then the embryo (or, if they could keep the individual alive long enough, a fetus) is harvested for the desired tissue, killing the individual being conceived for a tissue specific cloning purpose.
With first cell division, the newly conceived human life is constructing its own space capsule (the placental bubble and the fluid that inflates it) and its own individual body and blood. The woman in whom an embryo resides does not construct the placenta or the body of the newly conceived individual human life. In fact, it is the newly conceived individual who commandeers life support from the woman’s body ... it is the embryonic individual who initiates its own growth and development AND its life support from the woman’s body.
Cell division proves to the scientist that an individual human being is present. But there are other telling phenomena which prove the case that an individual human being is present as an embryo. Following are two.
The production of a sticky coating by the embryonic individual proves the desire to survive. Is that the same as the adult desire for shelter and sustenance? No, it is more akin to the hunger response, but it is unimpeachable evidence, to a scientist, that an individual being exists. Is that being, human? … If the parents are human, that’s always the case. Finally, if the embryonic individual did not construct the placental sac for its residence, the presence of a genetically foreign individual life in the woman’s body would cause her body to attack the ‘other’.
Why is it important to prove that an embryo is an individual human being? Because embryonic stem cell harvesting and therapeutic cloning are cannibalism.
The ‘enlightened’ expect you to accept the notion that an embryo is not an individual human being. Yet the scientist seeks to conceive 'designer' individual human life --with therapeutic cloning-- and the goal of the scientist bears witness to the truth that they are conceiving then for a time supporting the life of a unique human being. Giving tacit acceptance to a proven lie is bad enough --and we’ve done this for thirty years-- but to embrace cannibalism founded on such a lie is far more degenerate than breaching a moral or ethical dilemma.
If we do not accomplish a paradigm shift in the nation's perception regarding individual human life, two very unpleasant leviathans --embryonic stem cell exploitation and therapeutic cloning-- will devour what remains of our national goodness.
Only God’s mercy will continue our life support, as a nation, should we slide further down the slippery slope. We must somehow ascend back to the goodness of supporting all individual human life and repudiate the cannibalistic exploitation now looming as our future.