Weekend question
President Obama announced plans March 6 to begin taxpayer funding of human embryo experimentation, bad enough.
The question remains, however, whether Obama will also lift the ban against creating embryos specifically for research, rather than relying on “leftover” embryos in fertility clinics. Some researchers want unfettered access to human embryo creation and destruction. From the Washington Post today:
“We’re all waiting to see what the details of the policy will be,” said George Daley, a leading stem cell researcher at Children’s Hospital Boston. “If the policy were limited to lines exclusively from frozen embryos left over at IVF clinics, that would be a very restricted course and exclude some very important lines.”
Do you think Obama will lift that ban as well?
FYI, several member of Congress spoke during a Stem Cell Special Order March 5 against embryonic stem cell research and for adult stem cell research. Watch video here.
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
I don’t want EITHER ban lifted. If he lifts the ban on creating embryos for research, poor women will be exploited for their eggs.
How about NOT going the way of Nazi Germany and looking at what is really providing treatments and cures? ADULT STEM CELLS!
“Do you think Obama will lift that ban as well?”
Yes, because he HAS to. In order to apply to actual people any success with ESCR, you must create a clone of yourself through somatic cell nuclear transfer and strip mine and kill the embryo which is your clone of its embryonic cells to treat yourself. This is why adult stem cells have been so effective; because they come from YOUR body and YOUR body will not (usually) reject its OWN stem cells. Well, we we consider the problem of how to obtain YOUR OWN embryonic stem cells, the solution comes by creating a clone of yourself (which we have NOT been able to do at all yet, BTW) and taking the stem cells of your clone.
This is quite vampiric, if that’s a word which it isn’t. Create another human being to suck his blood so that you can live longer.
I hope so. They’re just cells. Outside of a woman’s uterus, they have no potential to become human beings, so it doesn’t matter what scientists do with them.
Posted by: reality at March 7, 2009 10:35 AM
‘Outside of a woman’s uterus, they [human embryos] have no potential to become human beings, so it doesn’t matter what scientists do with them.’
—————————————————-
Maybe you meant to write until the human embryos have implanted in a woman’s uterus, they will have no opportunity to mature into human fetuses and upon birth into human infants and then into human adolescents and then into human adults.
Some racial bigots would argue that non-caucasians never become fully human beings.
Some misogynistic chauvinists would argue that women never become fully human beings.
How and when does one come into possession of ‘beingness’?
Does an amoeba have ‘beingness’?
Please define ‘beingness’.
yor bro ken
The micro human parts trade is positioned to experience a boon under the Obama administration. There are no qualms about the ethical and moral dimensions of the issue, and whether harvesting embryonic stem cells constitutes the taking of a unique human life, which of course we know it does. All that matters is that the scientific ends (nothing even remotely close to showing promise) justifies the rationalistic means (they are just a bunch of cells). All of this, despite recent developments which show it is completely unecessary, and that other sources of stem cells can and are being derived from sources where there is not a moral question.
And yet we move forward. Why? Obama’s positions with regard to abortion rights, FOCA, Planned Parenthood, and embryonic stems cell research together point to something eerily resembling an obsession. His voting and argumentation on these matters while an Illinois state senator were to the left of his own party–which is really saying something. His appointments to a number of key posts reflect this extremism as well.
All of this is more easily understood within the context of moral relativism, a make believe world where no set of moral prescriptions trump those of another. The major proponent of moral relativism is academia. Their god is the “good” of the here and now. It is a fluid construct, as it is meant to be. What is “good” today may be passe tommorrow. With regards to the matter of experimenting upon human life, for relativists it does not matter that we have already seen the horrors of this type of rationalization played out in the scientific experiments on unwitting and unwilling subjects numerous times in the 20th century.
And yet, despite the relativists objections, there is always a hierarchy of moral goods. Logic dictates that there must be. For example, the current bunch of relativists see homosexual rights as one of these. Conversely, some regimes (including the lefts’ hero in Cuba) brutally suppress homosexuals using the same relativistic criteria. And then of course there is the greatest right of all, abortion. This trumps even the right to life, and if the Obama extremists get their way, it will trump the right of conscience as well.
Welcome to the new world order, Obama style, where attempts to marginalize and silence those who resist are well underway.
Reality 10:35am
Do you realize you consist of “just cells”.
Bobby, good points.
Gang, here’s a lengthy but invaluable article about public opinion and ESCR/cloning. It came out last year. It challenges the idea that ESCR is supported “overwhelmingly” by Americans.
Only 23% of respondents correctly understood that only adult stem cells have been used to help patients, and there was a strong overlap between people who claimed to understand the ESCR issue well and those who erroneously believed that ESCs have been helping people.
Furthermore, support for ESCR fluctuates greatly, going high above and well below 50%, depending upon how the question is asked. See, people go from strongly supporting to strongly opposing ESCR, depending on what part of the issue you wish to emphasize:
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/public-opinion-and-the-embryo-debates
Notice also that Americans oppose BOTH types of cloning, whether it’s to implant a cloned embryo into a uterus, or to destroy a cloned embryo for SCR.
You know, if they do crank up federal funding for ESCR, I hope they put in a stipulation that they can only experiment on proaborts…..
Some one correct me if I am wrong, but President Bush did not prohibit using human ESC’s for research.
Bush only prohibitted using federal funds to pay for the research.
So this discussion is not about the ‘rightness or wrongness’ of destroying human ESC’s, but about funding.
PBHO just sees this as another way to spend more federal funds/tax dollars and to reward/payback those who support his continuing campaign to be the first black president (which is not the same as being the first African-American president.).
PBHO is just stimulatin’ his base.
yor bro ken
“Bush only prohibitted using federal funds to pay for the research.”
He didn’t even do that. He LIMITED federal funding to that ESCR involving stem-cell lines already created, from human embryos already destroyed. He didn’t ban stem-cell research, he didn’t ban embryonic stem-cell research, and he didn’t even ban federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research (meaning every headline you’ve read in the last seven years about a “ban” is a lie). He merely made a compromise on what would be eligible for federal funding. Guess what: the European Union made the exact same compromise a few years later.