Scientists and ethicists said the approaches offered a potential compromise with social conservatives who see embryonic stem cell research as an untenable trade-off that amounts to destroying life to create medical cures.
Here's the score:
The fear spawned by stem cell research has never been about bioethics; it's a simple gut-level expression of the human aversion to "playing God." The "social conservatives" in question are antithetical to human betterment and can never be placated, despite their political posturing.
12 comments:
The big issue in the abortion/stem cell research debate is where to draw the line in the process of human development to say this thing/organism should be considered a human being with full human rights.
The conservatives want to draw the line at conception, so in order to be consistent with this they choose to view a cell that has split a couple of times as an "embryo".
Stem cell research using these "embryos" has put a light on the fact that this line is ambiguous and not really defendable from a practical or scientific viewpoint.
My fear is that as the ambiguity of this line becomes clearer and clearer, that rather than move the line forward in the process of human development they are more likely to move it backward and start trying to protect all of a woman's eggs which could also be viewed as "potential human beings" with all the attendant "rights".
Why stop there? Every cell in the human body has the genetic blueprints for a whole person. Every cell nucleus is a "potential human being."
Am I a mass murderer for cutting my fingernails?
Tis true the abortion argument remains up in the air because no one can pin down when human life starts. More accuratly they dont want to.
I believe we already have a yard stick by which to determine this. Doctors use it all the time in the ER. Not being a doctor I dont know what the exact criteria is but at some point they check for pulse and brain activitiy and either say this person is dead or he is not.
Why not use that same yard stick at the begining just as we use it at the end?
This is exactly the traditional Catholic argument against contraception (as I understand it). Every sperm cell and egg cell is a potential human being and only God has the right to determine which ones will realize that potential. Although I've never bought into it, this argument does, like a lot of Catholic dogma, has a certain, shall we say, compelling logic to it. Which may, in part, be the problem. The dogma is totally and absolutely coercive, no room for argument.
"Why not use that same yard stick at the begining just as we use it at the end?"
I kinda liked your idea when I first read it, but then I started to wonder at what point an embryo could be considered to have a human brain. Some people don't appear to have one when they are 50 years old. Until the brain is programmed it is hardly human and clearly there is only minimal programming installed at birth. Should we determine it based on a full compliment of hardware? When does this occur?
The brain is not the mind or the soul, and that's the real issue. Religious right-to-lifers believe that the soul enters the body at conception, so that if you abort after that, you are, in essence depriving a soul of its body (to say nothing of all the possibilities of a life to come). Frankly, I think they've got a point. Materialists and materialistic-minded people (most scientists, alas) tend to misidentify the brain with the mind and soul.
Personally, I consider this whole side of the issue bogus. You can believe what you want about brain/mind/soul being there or not. It's irrelevant. The critical point is this. I'm willing to concede that volutary abortion (where the mother's life is not in danger) may be in some fundamental sense "immoral" though I prefer not to make a hard and fast judgment. But the point here is that YOU CANNOT MAKE A MORAL JUDGMENT FOR SOMEONE ELSE, which is exactly what right-to-lifers are trying to do, as in many other areas of life as well. If an action that someone is taking IS NOT A THREAT TO PUBLIC ORDER AND DECENCY (as murder and other serious crimes are) then you have no right to proscribe it -- not in law and not by seeking to impose "moral standards" on other people. To do so IS to attempt to "legislate morality."
Any number of things that the same idiots are opposing fall under this rubric -- gay marriage, abortion rights, right-to-die, etc., etc. It's an extremely simple principle for us liberal Dems to adhere to because it cuts through all the metaphyscal bullshit that routinely get shoveled onto these kinds of issues.
weevee: gagcnnbj ("Gag CNN, B.J." -- Whoever B.J. is -- doubtless some Bush admin lackey -- he's done a good job!)
Weevee addendum: Given that he's a Bush administration flunky, "B.J." is probably one of Bush's famous nicknames -- applied in this case for patently obvious reasons.
Weevee addendum 2: I mean Bush's nicknames for OTHER people, of course, like "Turd Blossom" (Karl Rove). Nicknames FOR Bush are a whole nother can o' worms (for him, at any rate).
W.M.
I pretty much agree with your bottom line stand on the abortion issue, but I do not think that you can logically get there via the assumptions that you seem to be making.
First of all, I do not believe there is such a thing as mind/soul separate from the body. Let us assume there is such a thing, as you do. When does this soul first jump into the developing human. It could be before conception- causing the conception to occur. It could be at conception- this seems kinda tricky to me- the soul would have to be hanging around waiting for just the right time. It could be anytime during gestation. It could be at birth. It could be when the baby first says ma ma. Of course, we cannot answer this question, souls are not the province of science. Souls are the province of religion, so naturally we should turn to priests and theologians to answer this question. It is not really a moral issue, if it is an issue about souls- it is a theologic issue. I heard the pope was infallible on these kinds of issues, so perhaps you better listen to him, if the issue is about souls.
Fortunately, as you say, the issue really isn't about souls or where scientifically we should define a developing human as a human. It is really about whether anyone has the right to assume control of something that resides within someone else's body. We both agree that no one should have that right.
rju -- I don't see any real disagreement between us. I wasn't actually claiming to believe in the soul incarnation argument (at least not as usually described, especially by the Catholic church and Protestant fundamentalists with the soul seeming to be some kind of "birdlike entity" that "perches" in a body). Just that if you DO happen to believe this argument, THEN you can make what seems to me a fairly good case for the "immorality" of voluntary abortions. That is to say, I respect (without necessarily believing) this argument UP TO THIS POINT. I also think it's especially unfortunate that this line of reasoning generally gets people from both sides of the fence totally hung up on the so-called "morality" of abortion, with pro-choice types generally arguing that it's NOT "immoral" (whatever they might take that to mean). When they do this, they're really playing the fundamentalists game, because the fundies at least have a strong and clear idea of what they mean by "immoral" -- abortion is not just the "moral equivalent" of murder, it IS murder.
Of COURSE this is an absurd position, but if we can just manage to shift the ground to a debate over whether you can or cannot "legislate morality," we will at least have more solid ground to stand on. The fundies will still argue that yes, we can and should legislate morality in this case, but that's a much weaker argument and far easier to deal with than the whole "baby killers" syndrome.
The soul being attached to a body argument seems immensely weak to me, if abortion is just separating a soul from a body it latched onto, could not the soul just latch onto another body? Does not seem like much is lost since the body has experienced nothing and knows nothing. I don't think this is really the Catholic or Fundamentalist main arguement. Their deal is power. Only God should make decisions about life or death for anything. Man should never be given the power to make these decisions. Of course, since there is no God to make these decisions, it is actually men making the decisions and thus exerting power and control where they have no right to do it.
I don't really look at abortion as mainly a moral issue. The main issue is human rights. If your rights don't at least extend out to the outer layer of your skin, then you really have no rights. I don't want to live in a world where the state owns our bodies. If that is not something worth fighting for, I don't know what is.
Yeah. I have what I'd consider an extreme left liberal political take on these kinds of issues but I do get there through a different vocabulary than most. One problem I think a lot of liberals have with the fundie positions on these kinds of issues is just an utter failure to really understand where they're coming from. Abortion may not be a moral issue for you but they certainly is for THEM and I think this needs to be understood if not respected. Otherwise, it's like trying to make a political silk purse out of an ideological sow's ear. Or something.