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.
6 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?
"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?
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.
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.
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