-Caveat Lector- Wesley Smith on When Life *Really* Begins Source: National Review; July 19, 2001 [Attorney and consumer advocate Wesley J. Smith is the author of "Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America." You can purchase his books online in the books section of http://www.roevwade.org] I oppose federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research (ESCR). As I have argued repeatedly on NRO and in many other venues, federally funding ESCR is wrong because it would give the imprimatur of the people of the United States to treating human life as a mere natural resource, a crop, ripe for the harvest As I see it, once human embryos are viewed as being akin to a corn field, such stark utilitarianism will spread like a cancer to other areas of human medical concern. I have also noted that we are not faced with the stark choice of either destroying embryos for their cells or turning our backs on medical advances. Happily, it appears that alternative sources of stem cells offer at least equivalent potential to embryonic cells. Yes, embryonic stem cells may be more flexible, that is, easy to turn into any human tissue, but at least one published study has found that stem cells from bone marrow may provide equivalent potential for transformation. Yes, embryonic stem cells seem more active, but that may actually make them less desirable for use in human medical therapy since this aspect of their biology may be impossible to control and could lead to embryonic stem cell therapy causing tumors. Moreover, alternatives are already healing some human illnesses. For example, stem cells from umbilical cord blood have restored the immune systems of children whose cancer had previously destroyed their abilities to fight infection and disease. Indeed, it is a political triumph that opponents of ESCR have been able to transform the paradigm of the debate from one in which adult/alternative stem cells were damned with very faint praise to the point where a just published National Institutes of Health study proclaims their awesome potential. Unfortunately, these crucial issues, which should be the bases of deciding whether or not to federally fund ESCR, have been all but subsumed in the politics of abortion. This is truly disheartening. ESCR has absolutely nothing to do with abortion. Whatever one thinks of Roe v. Wade, the reason the Supreme Court created a constitutional right to abortion was to prevent women from being forced by law to use their bodies to gestate and give birth. But stem-cell research does not involve a pregnant woman being required by law to do anything. Thus the issue should be irrelevant. That is one reason why the United Methodist Church, which institutionally supports abortion rights, has just issued a proclamation urging President Bush's to continue the current suspension of federal funding for ESCR. Of course, logic and politics rarely inhabit the same space. The reality is that abortion touches almost every important issue this country has faces. It was at the heart of the impeachment imbroglio. It impacts foreign policy. It is certainly the crucial lynchpin in the appointment and confirmation of federal judges. It is thus hardly surprising that abortion politics has become symbiotically intertwined with the decision whether to federally fund embryonic stem cell research (ESCR). The immersion of abortion into the politics of ESCR has not proved beneficial to the pro-life movement. Whatever one thinks of their cause, it is clear that the power and momentum of the movement -- which remains vital despite media and legislative hostility -- is founded upon the fervent belief that human life begins at the point of conception and that all humans possess a right to life from that point through natural death. But now, several pro-life senators have abandoned this foundational principle. Senators Orrin Hatch (R., Utah) and Gordon Smith (R., Ore.), recently opined that life begins in a mother's womb, not a Petri dish or refrigerator. When I first heard the Hatch/Smith argument, I almost laughed out loud. While such sentiments might reflect the senators' deeply held metaphysical concepts, they surely are not biologically sound. After all, a blastocyst (a one-week gestational embryo) is a blastocyst, is blastocyst. If we were somehow able to take a one that had been fertilized within it's mother's body and place it next to a lab-fertilized blastocyst, there would be no biological difference between them. Both would reflect the same state of human life, as it exists after one week of embryonic development. I am laughing no longer. I have appeared recently on several talk-radio shows to express my opposition to federal funding of ESCR. I certainly expected a good give and take from those who support ESCR about the empirical and ethical issues involved in the debate. What I was not expecting was for listeners who fervently claimed they oppose abortion to declare, in their next breath, support for federal funding because, as one caller put it, "the soul does not enter the body unless it is in the mother's womb." Another caller expressed an even more surprising view. "I oppose abortion but God would not have permitted these embryos to be made unless he wanted them used for medical research." In other words, these callers believe that destroying an embryo at one week in woman's womb is the moral equivalent of murder. But take the same embryo and destroy it in a Petri dish and they proclaim themselves -- and God -- unconcerned. How does one argue with such perspectives? In such a milieu, biological facts are meaningless. The pros and cons of the different types of cell research are irrelevant. The potential for alternatives to ESCR to provide medical breakthroughs don't matter. The very real potential that embryonic research leads directly to cloning -- even the biotech industry says so -- makes not a dent. I am not sure what to make of all of this. But it seems to me that whatever side one is on in the great stem-cell debate, we should all be concerned that when prominent United States senators proclaim with a straight face that human life does not begin in a Petri dish but only in a womb and the argument works, post modernism has triumphed. 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