5/25/2005
Stem Cell Veto
Kudos should go out to President Bush for his upcoming VETO of a bill that would expand federal funding for embyonic stem-cell research. The President stated that "This bill would take us across a critical ethical line by creating new incentives for the ongoing destruction of emerging human life. Crossing this line would be a great mistake." I agree with the President on this one. I fear that humans being what we are, we will beginning a slow march where we are willing to use some humans, and alter humanity, for the purpose of bringing greater health and prosperity to some. In other words, use the weak and downtrodden to benefit those in power.
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What logic places you against this? For those that may have loved ones who could potentially benefit from this research, there is no logical reason to be against it. In fact, your praise for his reasoning in doing so completely contradicts that. It's a political position for his own pride and power.
Using a fertilized embryo to do research is problematic morally. A fertilized egg is the beginning of personhood. The embryo will grow into a baby if implanted in the woman's uterus. As such, I consider it to be the beginnings of life and personhood. It is not a full person, but it is worthy of some respect. Harvesting and cloning these eggs in order to do research that will benefit the rest of us worries me, as it shows a lack of regard for human life. From what I have read, in order to produce an embryo with the necessary traits to extract stem cells. Well, once you've done that, you have what is necessary to create human life. After all, an embryo and eventually a fetus must have some decree of being a human, as it makes little or no sense to say that they are not human and then (perhaps magically) turn into humans at birth. As such, we should be very wary of being willing to destroy them for the benefit of doing research. I'll quote Leon Kass here:
"It is rare to see a scientist who thinks that nascent human life has any dignity worth respecting whatsoever. One sees here something of the dehumanizing effect of experimenting on something you become so familiar with you no longer stand in any awe. If you want to see what is going to happen to the rest of us if we go down this road, you should look at what has happened to scientists themselves. They no longer look upon early embryonic human life as something before which we should stand in awe because of what it can develop into; they really treat it as chopped liver. To that extent, they find it unbelievable that anybody would want to protect nascent human life and they simply attribute it to religious superstitions. But you don't have to be religious or believe that the embryo is a full human person to recoil from wanting to see it turned into a natural resource."
I will admit that the question is a difficult one, and I am open to hearing arguments on why stem cell cloning should be permissible for research. However, the moral problem is one that needs to be given full considertaion. It is my opinion that experimenting and destroying the earliest building blocks of human life to benefit ourselves is a serious moral problem.
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