-Caveat Lector-
If you believe embryos are humans...
...then curbing research on stem cells is an odd place to start protecting
them
By Michael Kinsley
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/time/2001/06/25/embryos.html
June 18, 2001 Posted: 3:41 p.m. EDT (1941 GMT)
President Bush is said to be hoping for a compromise on whether to allow
federally funded medical research on cells from human embryos.
Compromise is a worthy goal. But on this issue, the notion of compromise
is an odd one for a couple of reasons.
First, the Clinton Administration's rules that Bush has suspended while he
searches for a compromise are themselves a compromise. They forbid
federally funded researchers to destroy human embryos, but they allow the
use of stem cells from embryos destroyed by others. What Bush wants is a
compromise of a compromise.
Second, the argument for banning this research depends on absolutism.
It's not just that people who oppose research using embryos feel strongly
about it. It's that the entire logic of their case makes it hard to give them
anything they would value as half a loaf.
To justify standing in the way of cures for some of humanity's most dreaded
diseases, you have to accept the right-to-life argument in its most extreme
form. We're talking here about newly formed embryos. These are not
fetuses with tiny, waving hands and feet. These are microscopic groupings
of a few differentiated cells. There is nothing human about them, except
potential--and, if you choose to believe it, a soul. Moreover, under the rules
Bush is blocking, stem-cell research would not actually take the life of a
single embryo. Researchers would use embryos that are being discarded
anyway.
To anyone who actually believes that new embryos are just as human as
you or me, this last point is like saying, "Well, the Holocaust is going on
anyway, so we might as well turn a few dead Jews into lampshades."
Accommodating to evil is evil. But if this is your line, you had better really,
really believe that discarding embryos is just like gassing Jews. That's
because if you get your way, then real, fully formed people will suffer and
die for your abstract point of principle. In fact, real people will suffer and die
as a result of any compromise that partly accommodates your abstract
principle. For that matter, real people will suffer and die because of the
months every breakthrough has been delayed while Bush looks for a
compromise. And because of Clinton's compromise. And because of all
the years federal stem-cell research was banned before that.
Even if the recently discovered adult stem cells turn out to be almost as
good as embryonic ones, which many politicians are hoping will spare
them a tough decision, that "almost" will lead to unnecessary suffering and
death if adult cells become an excuse to restrict embryonic ones. So, if
that's what you think justice for embryos requires, you had better be sure
you're right.
Are we really going to start basing social policy on the assumption that a
few embryonic cells equal a human being? If so, restricting research on
discarded embryos is an odd place to start. Why not restrict fertility clinics,
which routinely produce more embryos than they need and destroy the
surplus? To pursue the gruesome Holocaust analogy, it's like outlawing the
lampshades while ignoring the gas chambers. And yet President Bush is
not searching for compromise on the issue of fertility clinics because there
is no such issue. The Roman Catholic Church and others are publicly
opposed to high-tech fertilization techniques, but they are not beating the
drum about it.
And fertility clinics are not the only place where embryos are routinely
destroyed in the course of making a baby. Every year, in the U.S. alone,
nature (or God) kills hundreds of thousands of embryos so young that the
bearer didn't even know she was pregnant. About 15% of pregnancies end
in miscarriage, most of them in the embryo stage. Although there is
research going on to reduce miscarriages for the sake of would-be
mothers, there is no big crusade to save the lives of these lost embryos.
Why not?
Contrast this widespread tolerance, if not acceptance, of the mass
slaughter of embryos, even among right-to-lifers, with the huge fuss that
antiabortion forces have stirred up over the relatively rare practice they
insist on calling partial-birth abortions. This campaign emphasizes how
recognizably human end-of-term fetuses are. The explicit or implicit
argument is that these physical human qualities are at least part of what
makes late-term abortions as morally objectionable as killing a postbirth
human being. Either this argument is utterly disingenuous or the corollary
must be that destruction of a newly conceived embryo is morally less
objectionable.
If stem-cell research is banned or limited on the principle that just-
conceived embryos have rights just like the rest of us, that will be a
principle applied almost nowhere else. It's a principle that few people
actually believe in and one that almost nobody--not even sincere right-to-
lifers--really lives by.
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