ˇˇIMPORTANT NOTICE!! -- All who are sick of abortion-related topics, DO NOT READ ANY POSTS IN THIS THREAD.



Stem cell research is a hot topic in American politics today. On the one hand, pro-life purists maintain their consistency in recognizing a human embryo, even if formed out of the womb, as a human life with rights. On the other side, those who support stem-cell research emphasize the vast medical advances that it may bring, which would help many people with currently untreatable diseases. Following are a few thoughts and questions on the issue.

1. As with abortion, the question of when to recognize the moral and legal rights of a developing human life is central. If a four-day old embryo is not a legitimate human life, then there is no objection to using it for research. If it is a human life with full legal rights, then there is no justification for handing it over to the researchers. If it is a human life, but one whose protected legal status is mitigated by other factors, then we have to perform the difficult work of weighing some moral concerns against others.

In all of this, what frustrates me is the tendency of some journalists and propagandists to cast the issue in terms of experience and emotion, as if someone whose mother suffers from Alzheimer's ought to be ashamed of himself for sticking to the moral conviction that a fetus is a real human life and opposing the research that could alleviate his mother's suffering. As a nation, we need to be taught how to *resist* letting emotions drive our ethics, but we're usually encouraged to do the opposite.

2. On the topic of allowing emotion to drive ethics, the movie A.I. got me thinking about how we tend to be most compassionate towards those who resemble ourselves. The "mechas" who were shown being destroyed in the movie all bore human features -- even those who did not have human-like bodies at least had a human face. I wondered whether the scene would have generated as much compassion for the mechas if, despite being sentient, they resembled more traditional-looking machines and lacked the ability to speak and gesticulate like a human. I also wonder to what extent our tendency towards compassion for those who resemble ourselves informs our opinions about the status of a human fetus: when it looks like a baby our impulse is to protect it; when it looks more like a blob of tissue, that protective impulse is weak or nonexistent.

3. Proceeding from the premise that an embryo is in fact a legitimate human life, we have to grapple with post-WWII ethics and the inevitable comparison with the genocide carried out by Nazi Germany. A scientific committee after the war emphatically denied the rightness of using medical research obtained from inhumane experiments on Jewish prisoners. To use it, they argued, was to tacitly support the butchery that made that research possible, and to open the door to an ethic of exploiting the helpless for the benefit of the powerful. Their conclusion, in my judgement, was entirely correct.

Does this principle apply to stem-cell research? It may depend on the moral atmosphere in which the cells are obtained. If an embryo is a human life, then its guardians (usually the parents) cannot morally destroy it for the sake of convenience -- to do so would be to disregard the sanctity of that life and to permit defenseless persons to be used as chattels. On that account, cells obtained from the discarded embryos of fertility clinics should not be used for research.

Is it possible to conduct research on stem cells in circumstances that affirm the value of human life? What about the hypothetical case of parents who recognize the sanctity of that life, but nonetheless deliver their embryo to what they perceive to be the higher cause of developing cures for disease? This is different from the predatory economic opportunism of the biochemical lab that views the embryo as a disposable asset. Instead, the parent recognizes the embryo as a life but bases the decision on a more noble ethic of sacrifice on behalf of others. But is there ever a situation in which one person can make the decision to self-sacrifice on behalf of another?

The right of an individual person to knowingly sacrifice his *own* life for a good cause is universally acknowledged. In very limited situations, the right of an authority to sacrifice lives for a good cause (sending soldiers to die in defense of one's nation, for example) is also acknowledged. Does the authority of a parent over a child extend that far? I doubt it, but I'm not entirely sure. It's possible that there is some historical example of a parent exercising the authority to sacrifice the life of their child *without* abdicating their moral responsibility as a parent, but I can't think what it might be.

Right now I can say only this: the health benefits to diseased persons that might come from stem-cell research are not without their own weight in this issue. BUT if an embryo is a legitimate human life, as I believe it is, then we cannot sidestep the rights of that life for convenience's sake, regardless of the potential health or economic gains. To do so would be to admit the right of the powerful to prey upon the defenseless. The embryo could ONLY be used for research if it were true that a parent or guardian sometimes has the moral prerogative to sacrifice that life, without its consent, for a weightier cause. It may be true that an individual person's life is not the ultimate moral value, but few things outrank it, and it's hard to see anything in this cell-research issue that compellingly outweighs that right to life.

If you have any insights or arguments that would move the discussion forward, please post 'em.

Iss