Getting It Right, for a Change. Today is one of the rarest of days, a day on which I can actually agree with President Bush on something.
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Bush cast his first veto in 5½ years in office to reject loosening standards and increasing funds for embryonic-stem-cell research. In a brilliant bit of theater, the Bush team gathered a group of children born from "surplus" embryos created by fertility doctors, to demonstrate that we're really not talking about "cells" but about people when we talk of cutting up embryos for medical research. Alas, some people were not moved from their doctrinaire contempt for pre-birth babies.
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I overheard two liberals in my office last nite discussing the viability of castoff embryos from fertility clinics, justifying the willful destruction of these tiny children by suggesting that most of them would die in any case, so why not make use of them before then? Why not? Oh, a little thing called "morality". It's inconvenient, but decent people always think about the right and wrong of public-policy decisions. That bad things may happen to some people does not justify taking a public-policy decision to cause bad things to happen to people.
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A large portion of implanted embryos do, in fact, die before birth. Some die within days or weeks. Others die after months but well before full term. That's why fertility clinics routinely implant multiple embryos. That, in turn, is why we sometimes have women giving birth to litters of five, six, seven babies rather than just one, as originally intended. Because the die-off that was expected to happen did not happen, and the embryos proved stronger than expected.
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Even in nature, some unknown proportion of embryos die within hours, days, or weeks, unknown to the mother. When the child gets large enuf to be felt, and then dies, the mother does notice, and "miscarriage" turns celebration of an impending birth into an overpowering sense of loss and grief.
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But the mere fact that some embryos do not survive to infancy does not justify willfully killing all embryos of a given class ("unwanted", "surplus") and chopping them up for parts.
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The rationalization that the embryos at issue were not created to be chopped up, but are just "surplus" or "discard" embryos that would die anyway, without contributing anything to science, constitutes willful moral blindness. You know full well that if "surplus" embryos can be chopped up for parts, there will suddenly come to be a lot more "surplus" embryos, because fertility clinics linked to stem-cell research facilities will deliberately create a lot more embryos than they would if every embryo created were to be used only to make wanted babies. This is the "slippery slope" we set foot upon when we rationalize chopping up "surplus" embryos.
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Consider the accusation made against Communist China, that it not only harvests organs from executed criminals but that it actually trumps up charges against political opponents to justify killing them, at once to eliminate enemies of the state and to harvest a rich cash crop of organs for foreigners. U.S. policy goes much too far in the opposite direction, forbidding even the voluntary donation of organs by prisoners in federal prisons except to family members. That's insane.
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We can certainly justify harvesting organs from executed criminals of our own, whether their families consent or not, as part of the retribution and rebalancing of interests that the criminal law is intended to carry out. We can simply make the public-policy pronouncement that people who forfeit the right of life thru criminal acts forfeit as well the right to decide what happens to their body after death. Easy.
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Does that entail another "slippery slope"? Would such a policy incline juries and judges more readily to convict people whose guilt is in doubt, or impose a death sentence they would otherwise not impose? That strikes me as dubious in the first instance and of questionable impropriety in the second. It's generally very hard to get juries of ordinary people to vote for the death penalty, even for inhuman scum who richly deserve to die for their crimes. If organ harvest made it easier for jurors to accept their moral responsibility to impose the ultimate punishment for the wickedest among us, so much the better.
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The majority of the U.S. public favors embryonic-stem-cell research, because most people don't know the facts, don't understand biology, and have come to have very little regard for innocent human life as long as the person at issue hasn't been born yet. Legalized abortion has produced a callousness to infant death we never as a society felt before.
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Never mind that every last one of us was once unborn, so by the standards of today every last one of us could have been killed with impunity and, thru the technology of the present, have had our parts redistributed to others.
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Perhaps the best line ever written for our first imitation-President, the brilliant actor Ronald Reagan who actually had billions thinking he was President of the United States, was "I've noticed that everybody that is for abortion has already been born." This is, again, like hazing: those who have successfully emerged from it don't think it's such a big deal. Except that if hazing invariably involved death, no one would successfully get thru it and think it trivial thereafter.
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The "Social Compact" is a fictitious contract among the members of society to help each other and defend the rights of every member of the community not because we might ourselves someday need help or defending, but because it is the right thing to do. The prosperous and able-bodied assist and protect the poor and enfeebled not because they think they might someday themselves be poor and feeble (tho they might), but because it is the right thing to do. Men defend women not because they might someday be women themselves, but because it is the right thing to do. And people already born defend the unborn not because we might ourselves someday be unborn, nor even because we were once ourselves unborn, but because it's the right thing to do.
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As is so often the case, perhaps we need to put a "what if" to clarify the moral issues. So, what if we allowed embryos to be created for the express purpose of chopping them up for stem cells, but only embryos of blacks, Orientals, American Indians, Jews, girls, and the poor. Would that be okay? I imagine that rich and powerful white Christian men might be willing to make that compromise with the 'liberals' who want unencumbered embryonic-stem-cell research. Would that be wise and good social policy? I don't think so.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,558.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:18 PM