Guess Those Embryos Are Best Left in the Garbage

Abortion has always been a complicated moral issue for me.  I support a woman's right to choose, but have sympathy for the moral claims on the other side of the issue.

Research that utilizes the stem cells of human embryos is not so morally complicated.  These are embryos lying in freezers, often from fertility clinics, that will be discarded anyway.  They are not fetuses growing inside a womb.  And so the prospect of harvesting stem cells from these embryos to cure debilitating diseases does not cause me a second thought.

President Bush ostensibly sees things differently.  But if he really thought that harvesting stem cells was tantamount to murder, he would have sought to block federal funding for it altogether.  Instead, he has allowed the research already ongoing in 2001 to continue. This is when he decreed that there could be no funding of new stem cell lines.  Yesterday's veto, of a bipartisan measure to increase federal support of stem cell research, merely keeps the old limits in place.

Philosophical consistency argues that what is "murder" in 2006 was also "murder" in 2001.  The lack of consistency reveals that, unsurprisingly, the veto was an act of political expediency.

Most Americans back increased federal support for stem cell research, just as most Americans desired that Terri Schiavo should die with dignity last year.  But the right wing of the Republican Party wants to interfere with the medical decisions of other families, and also ban the type of research that would make these decisions less painful.  These are the people to whom the President pays tribute. It is why he used the first veto of his Presidency in support of a cause that will cost American lives.

Comments

[Cynthia]

Did you see the BBC article about this?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5197926.stm

I especially enjoyed this quote: "It is a strange morality indeed that
pins the moral status and life of the embryo on the question of who is
paying for the research."

[Marie Ascher]

I agree with everything you've written re embryos. And another thing that I keep thinking about is, why isn't there a national umbilical cord blood bank? Stem cells can be harvested from cord blood that can be easily collected from every single birth -- presumably with the mother's permission. Now that they know this, why isn't this a major part of the discussion? Who could object?

While I was pregnant I received a lot of mail from companies who wanted to bank my cord blood for a pretty steep fee. Quite honestly I couldn't afford it (times two for fraternal twins with different blood types), but I did seek to find if I could donate my cord blood -- to research, to a bank, whatever. No can do. That's a shame. But I feel pretty confident that this is the future.

[Marie Ascher]

Actually, I have to amend what I wrote earlier to say that there appear to be some public cord blood banks now, although very limited (e.g. no hospitals in NY State participate) -- and of course it's controversial: See http://www.marrow.org/NMDP/cord_blood_idx.html

You still don't hear much of this in the whole stem cell debate, though. Why is that?