Congressional Herrings
Posted Monday, July 16, 2001, at 11:30 PM ET
This week, according to the New York Times, a House subcommittee will hear testimony from people who used to be frozen embryos—until some couple adopted them and ushered them through gestation. The idea is to stigmatize research on embryonic stem cells: If those frozen embryos had been sent to some sterile laboratory instead of a loving home, these people wouldn't exist.
PRINT
DISCUSS
E-MAIL
RSS
RECOMMEND...
Facebook
MySpace
Mixx
Digg
Reddit
del.icio.us
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Sphere
StumbleUponAnd of course this is true. It's also true that if my parents had used a condom—or a little self-discipline, for crying out loud!—in the spring of 1956, I wouldn't be here. So I'm waiting for my call to testify in support of legislation banning condoms and self-discipline.
Not that this line of thought is very relevant to the issue at hand anyway. No stem-cell researcher I know of aspires to use embryos that are slated for adoption. Rather, the idea—the idea that President Bush is now famously agonizing over—is to use frozen embryos that are slated for destruction. Now, I suppose it's possible that one of these 140-celled frozen entities could somehow be plucked from the brink of destruction and placed inside a womb. (Maybe the couple that created it, and authorized its disposal, has a literally last-minute change of heart.) But this wouldn't exactly be an everyday occurrence.
The stem-cell controversy marks a watershed for the "pro-life" forces whose heat Bush is now feeling. In the past, their preference for the label "pro-life" over "anti-abortion" was broadly defensible. They wanted embryos and fetuses that were headed for abortion to instead become full-grown people—and, in the absence of abortion, those embryos and fetuses would have become full-grown people. So the natural result of these "pro-life" policies would indeed be to increase the amount of human life in the world.
But now the "pro-life" position has the opposite drift. In the long run, embryonic stem-cell research would help keep people alive for longer, not to mention improve the quality of their lives. And this research—unlike abortion—can proceed without preventing births that would otherwise occur. So the research ban that "pro-life" activists favor is literally anti-life.
Could we really guarantee that this research wouldn't bring the destruction of embryos that would otherwise have become full-grown people? Yes. Last week a Virginia fertility clinic announced that it had created embryos for stem-cell research by soliciting eggs and sperm for that purpose—eggs and sperm that, if not for this research mandate, would never have met. And a Massachusetts company said it was trying to create embryonic stem cells via cloning—cloning that, similarly, wouldn't take place but for the demands of research.
When these techniques are used to make stem cells, the argument that "pro-life" forces are straining to make via this week's hearings—that stem-cell research could prevent some off-the-shelf embryo from growing up to appear on C-SPAN—isn't even a logical possibility, much less a plausibility. In this light, it's odd that these techniques strike many people as creepier than using off-the-shelf embryos. But that's just more testament to the high ratio of ineffable sentiment to articulable thought in this debate. (OK, I guess you can imagine well-articulated revulsion over these techniques, but I haven't seen much of it.)
I admit that I'm being a utilitarian here. In calling the purportedly pro-life position anti-life, I'm defining pro-life as "that which on balance leads to a net increase in life." And of course the "pro-life" forces aren't making a utilitarian argument to begin with. They're saying that an embryo is life, so killing it is murder, regardless of the benign effects of using its cells for research.
But even if you grant them their philosophical framework, their stem-cell argument is on shakier ground than their abortion argument. After all, an embryo—or a fetus—that resides in a womb will, if left to its own devices, become an adult human being, thus lending at least some credence to the claim that it was a person all along. An embryo in a petri dish, if left to its own devices, will never become anything other than an embryo in a petri dish. (In that sense, using a condom is closer to murder than embryonic stem-cell research is. A sperm and egg, if left to their own devices, and not separated by an artificial latex wall, would become a full-fledged person, whereas a frozen embryo would not.)
Sen. Orrin Hatch, of all people, has recognized this shakiness in the position of most pro-lifers on the stem-cell debate. He and a few other prominent pro-lifers have commendably and correctly insisted that they can retain their pro-life credentials while favoring embryonic stem-cell research. In essence, their argument is that you need three things to make a person—a sperm, an egg, and a womb—and until you have all three, you don't have a person. (My friend and fellow Slate scribe William Saletan contends that Hatch is muddled, but I beg to differ. Hatch, by the way, has also recognized the utilitarian sense in which, as I note above, embryonic stem-cell research is pro-life, even if he doesn't use the word utilitarian.)
So here is the philosophical scorecard: 1) If you grant the "pro-life" forces their nonutilitarian philosophical framework, then their opposition to embryonic stem-cell research is a non sequitur; it is not logically compelled by the premises that their previous policy positions entailed. In other words, one can believe that an embryo residing in a womb is a person without believing that an embryo residing in (and created in) a petri dish is a person. 2) If you instead adopt my philosophical framework and construe the term "pro-life" in utilitarian terms, then the opposition of "pro-lifers" to embryonic stem-cell research is downright self-contradictory—literally anti-life.
Regardless of which philosophical framework you choose, there is no valid cause for the avowedly pro-life Bush to agonize over this decision—unless the agony is political, and not philosophical.
The John Cassavetes Movie That Changed American Cinema Forever
Am I Wasting My Money if I Give to a Needy Family at Christmas?
Troy Patterson: What I Love About Glee
Hurray! We Won the War on Spam.
Bill Simmons' The Book of Basketball Is a Crude, Fantastic Mess
Thanks, FDA, but We Don't Need Your Protection From Raw Oysters
Reader Comments From The Fray:
[Notes from the Fray Editor: Munguza, below, made another post in which he compares Rep. Gary Condit with the pro-life activists: you need to read it to make the connection. Adam Robinson had a heartfelt question: are we "willing to sell our souls?"]
Unless I am misunderstanding what's actually happening, the scientist who created embryos in order to destroy them are actually much worse than those who use discarded embryos. What moral right do they have to create human embryos in order to kill them and use them, no matter how good their intentions? You can almost argue that it's OK to use the unwanted embryos--which will die anyway, most likely--but how do you justify creating human life--even if it's just a few cells--in order to use it for someone else's benefit?
And I'm not buying the whole importance-of-the-womb story. The reason I support abortion rights is that I believe women have the right to govern their own bodies, not because I think they have the right to kill. Pregnancy is so invasive that to be denied an abortion is a severe affront to women's autonomy. If you could grow a fetus to full-term in some sort of contraption, however, my support would definitely lessen.
There are some other things I haven't thought out, though. I think that if your own mother thinks that on balance it is better that you not be born, maybe she's right. Mothers are that important, and there aren't always appropriate adoptive people around. So I'm not saying I think it's all cut and dried.
But allowing scientist carte blanche to do whatever they want is a sure way to--if you care about nothing else I've said--eventually create a huge social backlash against them, and more importantly, their funding!
--Ferdinanda
(To reply, click here.)
An important test of their commitment to so-called "pro-life" beliefs is whether opponents of stem cell research will forswear personal use of any cures eventually developed by research using embryonic stem cells.
If stricken with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, or some other disease, will they refuse the treatments & cures developed from a process they oppose on the grounds that it is murder? Will they pay for such services when their money will likely fund additional research on embryonic stem cells? Or will they make the utilitarian argument that since the research is already done, they ought not to be denied its benefits?
You can bet your sweet cytoplasm that they'll be demanding the very cures whose development they are presently witholding from eveyone else.
--Munguza
(To reply, click here.)
The big question: when does human life begin? is a non sequitur. A new human is constructed from human living things: an egg and a sperm. The process has no singular instant that seperates nonhuman from human or nonliving from living; it's all human, it's all alive… The important issue is not when does human life begin, but rather: when does a U.S. citizen begin ? It will, of course, be an arbitrary definition. But so is the drinking age and the speed limit.
--Joey Giraud
(To reply, click here.)
(7/17)