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Nancy Reagan's call to ease the restrictions on stem cell research, which promises to cure a multitude of deadly diseases, has found a new poignancy after the death of her husband from Alzheimer's.
Despite tremendous political pressure from Nobel Laureates to congressmen, Bush recently announced that he is unwilling to budge from his 2001 decision that denied federal funding to studies conducted with embryos, a policy which has stunted scientific progress. The president held to the premise that the use of embryos for research is equivalent to the murder of human beings. "Like a snowflake, each of these embryos is unique, with the unique genetic potential of an individual human being," the president said.
Bush believes that being human is a morally significant characteristic, that a cluster of cells with human DNA and a breathing adult are equally human. If he is correct, does it imply that we ought to treat both lives with equal value? We treat viable people in different stages of development differently. Most people agree that selling pornography to young children should be illegal. Yet the same people will protest laws that put similar restrictions on adults. Because adults and children are equally human, we see that human treatment does not imply consistent treatment throughout the life cycle. We, instead, evaluate the characteristics and interests of a human at various stages of development to determine what the appropriate ethical treatment is.
What are the characteristics and interests of a 3- to 5-day-old embryo? Looking through a strong microscope, one first sees a circular membrane. Inside of that membrane are approximately 30 stem cells. This mass has neither consciousness nor sense of pain. Like any other human cell, life is a meaningless concept to an embryo. It makes no sense to say that death is against its interest.
The president cites other characteristics to defend the sanctity of embryos: their genetic uniqueness and their potential for being a unique individual human.
Rub your arm. You've just killed Homo sapiens skin cells.
Right-to-life advocates claim that one important distinction between abortion and rubbing skin cells off one's arm is that the former destroys a unique genome. But identical twins share the same DNA. If we killed one twin, its genome is not destroyed. Is killing one twin morally analogous to killing skin cells? If not, then whether or not a unique genome is destroyed is morally insignificant.
What about the potential for being a unique individual human? At the pluripotent stage, the embryo is nearly indistinguishable from the millions of cells that die in the human body each minute. Like stem cells, skin cells hold our entire biological blue print. Under the right conditions, they have the potential to create an identical twin through a cloning process.
Stem cells also never develop further spontaneously. Excess embryos created through the in-vitro fertilization process cannot become full grown human beings without implantation inside of a uterus. Lying in a Petri dish, stem cells have as much potential to become a child as the skin you just rubbed off your arm.
There are millions of embryos frozen in fertility clinics across the United States. None of these cells will ever be a viable human being. For all the people currently deteriorating from diseases such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, it's infuriating that our president would rather have excess embryos discarded or idling away in freezers than be used in the search for cures.
Bush believes there is something sacred about stem cells--- that they somehow deserve to be treated like sentient and self-aware human beings--- even at the expense of families who are actually capable of suffering. In reality, stem cells are nearly identical to the innumerable amounts of human cells that die in our bodies every day. Let's direct our sympathy to the "humans" that actually deserve it.
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