@Hypocrisy_Central – Dear, I think I understand what you’re saying here. Like many of your questions, it seems to be a (not very) thinly veiled jab at a society that would condone abortion for any reason. You may be thinking, “How could these people, who, if they were pregnant, just go one afternoon and get the little nipper sucked right out, perhaps between a trip to Starbucks and on their way to the latest Brad Pitt movie, why wouldn’t they condone doing other things that that are just as ghastly and monstrous as that? It’s like they don’t believe life has any value, and if they don’t care about the precious babies, why stop there?”
In your (perfectly valid) moral view, condoning the taking of embryos for stem cell research and treatment is ending a beating heart, right? And if we don’t do these other things, just because Science says we can, we must be totally hypocritical, because I can tell by your name here that you are primed to see that sort of thing. And I know a lot of your questions have the formula of, “If you allow abortion, why not allow [fill in the blank]?”
I get that. I really do. Sort of.
See, that’s the problem with moral codes and absolutes. To you, and people who subscribe to your same moral code, these things are alike, and tolerating them is hypocrisy. It holds that believers in this code rightly ought not do so. But not everybody holds to the same code as you, and I think that might be where people like me get confused and bewildered by questions like this.
The question people ask about abortion (and, by extension, embryonic stem cell research) is, “Should we slaughter the unborn?” Nobody is happy about slaughter, at least nobody with a working set of morals. But the question we should be asking is, “Is a fetus or embryo the moral equivalent of a human being?” In my moral view, it is not. So your question, to me, reads something like, “If you’re willing to kill an innocent head of romaine lettuce to make a Caesar salad, why bother obeying traffic laws? Why not just plow through any traffic light you please, no matter who you maim and kill in the process, because clearly you have shown by your willingness to eat lettuce, that you have no respect for life.” This sounds snarky and mean to you, I’m sure. But it isn’t meant that way: that’s really how I frame this question with my (very different) moral code. Because you and I hold to different beliefs, the same things are not hypocritical of me to do, as they would be for you, the same way that it might be a horrible sin for a kosher-keeping Jew to eat a ham and cheese bagel, but it isn’t for me.
HC, you know one reason that stem cell research doesn’t bother me – not even the embryonic kind? It’s because they’re not ripping them, silently screaming, from the warm safety of the wombs of their mothers for this purpose. I imagine (perhaps wrongly) that this is how you picture it happening – clearly the ending of a helpless baby’s life. But largely, it’s not. In my state, for example, a few years ago we finally allowed the use of embryos that were leftover from in vitro fertilization treatments for this research (as opposed to no stem cell research being allowed). These are fertilized eggs that parents no longer needed because they had already implanted as many as they were going to implant. They were frozen, never having been inside a womb. Normally, they go out with medical trash. But the pro-life folks campaigned hard against that law, citing the death of the poor innocent babies. I guess they thought that these embryos should have rightly been tossed into the Dumpster as had been intended, but when I brought that up, they’d get mad at me. Truth from fiction – not all embryos are destined to be born when couples make them for IVF use.
If a woman wants to adopt one of the snowflake babies to bear in on her own, more power to her – but there aren’t enough willing wombs to take them all. Now, what do you think is a fitting, dignified life for a discarded, extra embryo? To me, it’s a waste to throw them in the Dumpster at the end of the day, when that tiny would-be life can actually have some purpose and dignity afforded to it by helping to end someone else’s suffering. Someone who is already alive, someone who has a family that loves him or her. If I, as a frozen embryo, were given the choice between being thrown away in a landfill, or giving a diabetic a working pancreas, or allowing an Alzheimer’s patient to recognize his family again, or helping to allow a teenage girl who was born deaf to hear her father say he loves her, I’d do it in a minute.
To me, if someone is truly pro-life, it’s hypocritical to not support this use of extra embryos. More of them should be granted the opportunity to be of service in their tiny ‘lives,’ rather than rot in the trash.
Now, you ask, “If they could get everything they wanted from menstrual blood they would not be crying when Dubaya was in office to get at the embryos.” That article was printed in 2007. It’s a later innovation, something learned later – likely it was unknown when they were “crying to Dubya.” But I don’t know if we would have bothered to look there if we hadn’t been able to learn about embryos first. It’s a progression. So this is sort of like saying, “Hey kid, now that you’re 16 and can drive your car wherever you need to go, why were you crying for your mom to drive you to the movies when you were 12?” Times change. Knowledge grows, resting upon previous research. But I still think about what a waste it is to trash embryos when they could be better used to restore quality of life to someone in misery. To me, THAT is the hypocrisy.
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