The Slippery Slope of Stem-Cell Research
2 Aug 2005
Tennessee Senator Bill Frist is being roundly condemned by conservative Christians for flip-flopping on the issue of stem-cell research. Frist insists, however, that he has not flip-flopped, but always believed “that the federal government should fund embryonic stem-cell research.” Despite the glaring contradiction of his present position on stem-cell research to pro-life policy, the Senate majority leader adamantly alleges he’s still pro-life. He assured his fellow-senators, “I believe that human life begins at conception” and that an “embryo is nascent human life.”
Although commonly practiced by his political colleagues, Senator Frist has surprised his supporters by joining the senatorial glee club that sings out of both corners of its mouth at the same time. In an attempt to justify his joining of the Senate’s coo coo chorus, Frist explains that he only supports federal funding on “embryonic stem cells derived from blastocysts”—embryos leftover from fertility therapy. Since these embryos “will not be implanted or adopted, but are destined by the parents to be discarded and destroyed," Frist argues that they might as well be used in federally funded research. After all, it’s better to use them for research than to throw them in the trash can.
It may be argued that it is more humane to murder someone by shooting them execution style than by torturing them to death. Still, no United States Senator in his right mind is going to advocate execution style murders (at least not when it comes to those on his side of the aisle). How then can a sane Senator Frist defend his support of federal funding for stem-cell research on the absurd premise that the embryos were going to be discarded and destroyed anyway? Sorry, Senator, but your dog won’t hunt. Your position is untenable and your argument unsound.
There is another question that needs to be asked, however. It’s not a question for Senator Frist alone, but for all of us who claim, as he does, to be pro-life. If we really believe that life begins at conception, why are we silent on the issue of fertility therapy, which produces numerous embryos, many of which are eventually stored in freezers or thrown into the waste bin? Like the good Senator, we can’t have it both ways either.
Isn’t it time to admit that taking the mystery of life out of the only hands in which it can be trusted—divine hands from which all life derives—and putting it into human laboratories for men to play with is a slippery slope that leaves us all slipping and sliding toward moral morass? None of us can find a sure moral footing on such treacherous terrain. Still, we keep clumping along in our clumsy moral ineptitude unimpeded by the horrors of harvesting embryonic stem-cells and human fetal tissue for spare body parts. Even the looming and far more ominous horror of human cloning deters us not in our inelegant trek toward ethical disaster.
Don Walton
|
