When the man from the Washington Post called the Assistant Secretary to ask whether the Bush administration believes that embryos—microscopic clumps of cells—are human beings, the Assistant Secretary told him not to worry about it. The Post man had discovered an unpublicized change a month ago in the charter of the government's Human Research Protections Advisory Committee. The charter used to call on the committee to advise health officials "on a broad range of issues" about using people in medical research. As reported in the Post this week, it now calls for a "particular emphasis on … pregnant women, embryos and fetuses."
The Assistant Secretary said, in essence, it's only words. The committee can ignore them, and government officials can ignore the committee. The Assistant Secretary said the change was motivated by a special concern for women, and that the word "embryos" was used only because some people use the terms "embryo" and "fetus" interchangeably.
This last bit makes no sense whatsoever and must be a lie. There is no need to say "embryos and fetuses" for the benefit of people who think that the two words mean the same thing. The only reason to say "embryos and fetuses" is to address people who do not think they are the same thing, and to let them know that whatever you are saying applies to both.
It probably is true that this small puddle of verbiage will have no practical effect on government policy. It is just another Bush administration attempt—possibly even reflexive rather than calculated—to have it both ways on a controversial moral issue: Throw a bit of language to a powerful interest within the Republican Party (the religious right) while reassuring everybody else that nothing will come of it.
Pardon me for not being reassured. An assurance that someone can be counted on to violate his own alleged principles seems inherently unreliable. If politicians are going to claim to have principles, citizens are entitled to assume they mean what they say, however unlikely this may be. Does George W. Bush believe that embryos are human beings with full human rights, or does he not? As someone with a direct personal interest in the promise of stem-cell research, which uses discarded embryos from fertilization clinics, I would like a straight answer. So, I imagine, would those who truly believe that every discarded embryo is like a slaughtered infant.
If embryos are to be regarded as human beings, the Advisory Committee's job is easy: use of embryos violates almost any random paragraph in the government's human-research guidelines (the stuff about informed consent, for example, or discrimination against vulnerable groups). In fact if embryos are people, such research is morally impossible, along with all in vitro fertilization and many other familiar human activities. If an embryo is a human being, it is protected not just by the civil rights laws but by ordinary criminal laws as well. Should married couples be allowed to engage in a popular practice that routinely leads to the production and destruction of untold numbers of embryos? Well, there goes sex.
President Bush no doubt would find such logic-chopping tedious. A lack of intellectual vanity is one of his more appealing characteristics, though it sometimes smacks of aristocratic complacence. (Thinking is for losers!) He is not disconcerted, or probably even amused, at the thought of his administration defending an impossibly stupid policy premise on the basis of its own stupid impossibility.
But medical research involving embryos is one issue where Bush has posed as a one-man Aspen Institute, bragging Clinton-style about all the books he has read, experts he has consulted, thinking he has done. And he has attempted to portray his incoherent policy as the result of subtle reasoning and moral anguish, rather than confusion and calculation.
In Washington, confusion and calculation are often mistaken for thoughtfulness. The press respects a politician who can't make up his mind. Huge reputations have been built around the comic premise that if you're of two minds about everything, you must be pretty brainy. President Bush, it's true, cannot easily exploit this convention. Widely regarded as having at most one mind, he may find two a hard sell. But on this one he's been trying: On the one hand, embryos are human beings. On the other hand, I'm only acting on that belief in random symbolic thrusts. Solomonic, eh? Now let's drop it.
Abortion is a tough question for most people, but the related issue of embryos and medical ethics can be a lot easier. It can be solved without a lot of stagy agonizing, and without trivializing other people's moral concerns, even ones you may not share. An embryo has no feelings, no self-awareness, nothing that would give anyone a concern about its welfare except for its potential to develop into something we recognize as human. Religion can give you that concern as a matter of faith, but government policy should not be based on this belief any more than on the religious belief of some people that plants have souls.
What bothers people is that there is no clear moment in human development when an embryo becomes a fetus or a fetus becomes a person. The gradual way fetuses take on aspects of real personhood is what makes the second line so controversial. The first line is not nearly so fraught with implications. There is a whole range of reasonable answers that threaten no one's personhood. Law and morality draw so-called "bright lines" all the time when reality is fuzzier. This one's easy, if a solution is what you want.
But if you actually solve the problem, you can't have it both ways. Better to keep agonizing.
Michael Kinsley is a columnist for the Washington Post and the founding editor of Slate. Remarks From The Fray
What do you mean by "solved?" I'm not seeing a solution, if by that you mean letting the "free market" run wild, which I think we can all see is where this debate is going to end eventually. This is about a lot more than what happens to discarded embryos from fertility clinics. The only limit to these technologies is in your imagination. Maybe the reason Bush prevaricates, or futzes around, or what-have-you, is because he knows perfectly well that he can't stop this no matter what he does, so why work so hard? Just lie back and enjoy it, right?
I realize that, as in First Amendment debates, it is always more fashionable to play the absolutist. Such arguments will always hold together better. But do you really want to live in that world? This is just not as easy as you make it sound. Or it should not be. And as flawed as government may be, I say, the private sector is at least as bad.
-- Ferdinanda
(To reply, click here.)
Plants will never think, Mr. Kinsley. And apes will never do surgery, hold a piano recital with meaning, or scan the morning paper for tidbits of amusement and folly.
You see, the problem with many of Michael Kinsely's posts is that sometimes they're like trying to run your hand down a rose without getting snagged on the thorns; so often and many are the thorny side notes that beg for explanation before one can move onward. This phrase in particular unravels while it is yet in construction, for example:
"Abortion is a tough question for most people, but the related issue of embryos and medical ethics can be a lot easier. It can be solved without a lot of stagy agonizing, and without trivializing other people's moral concerns, even ones you may not share. An embryo has no feelings, no self-awareness, nothing that would give anyone a concern about its welfare except for its potential to develop into something we recognize as human. Religion can give you that concern as a matter of faith, but government policy should not be based on this belief any more than on the religious belief of some people that plants have souls.."
No sir. Abortion (as well as embryonic research) is "tough" only because of pressure politics and ideology, and in the concrete, unreflective skulls those who've placed the material and health comforts of one life-stage category as being putatively better off for the efforts, as compared to the trivializing of human life on the other end of the "importance" spectrum. His denial that government can or should "pay attention" to the moral concerns of many in itself "trivializes" the very issue he says is not. Not religion or other ethereal notions that he compares with animistic primitivism akin to thinking plants have souls or are volitional entities. An embryo may have no feelings or self-awareness or whatnot, but then it WILL at some point, in all probability, whereas plants blueprints never allow for this and never will. Plants too have no "feelings", nor do bacterial infestations and hordes of flies, yet all have their place if one were to talk to those advocating protection of , say, the Amazon river basin. How much more is lost than mere bugs and weed diversity if those without a voice in the earliest stages of life are denied birth. History is unfortunately silent on those specific things, events, productions, inventions, and creative contributions of those who're never born. But the loss is no doubt there.
Whether one thinks that a Creator truly endowed humanity with gifts that place us somewhere along the ladder higher than primordial organic paste, where the animal rights radicals place all organic matter, or some other mechanistic process was at work is largely not the point here. The point Kinsley is missing is that the potential that is encoded into each human embryo is there from the outset, whereas it is not for any other creature or organism on the planet. It is this very blueprint that seems to make the ghoulish harvesting of this human flesh profitable to the medical industry. Or so we are told in confidence.
In the modernist scenario, which Kinsley seems to follow here, however, no doubt some would go the ludicrous extent of chiming in that today we must affirm that some kinds of frogs and butterflies are "logically" more worth our preservation efforts than some people's offspring. And this is what I and others were afraid might happen someday. There can be no complete "hightening" of the animal kingdom to make them have par with humanity. There can only be a digression of the human realm down to the level of the mere animal. Cells are cells, after all. Right?
-- Wakefield Tolbert
(To reply, click here.)
Mr. Kinsley wants hypocritical arguments to condemn, he need look no further than the position he presumably supports. Indeed, the bright and shining - albeit necessary - lie of Roe v. Wade has always been that there is some bright line separating the point at which human potentiality is magically transmuted into humanity as well as that line being best drawn at the end of the first trimester, the "quickening," or any other (historical) standards of common law.
It is all quite a matter of black and white for Kinsley. He "admits" the line between a fetus and "real personhood" is hard to distinguish, never feeling the need to acknowledge his tacit assumption that such a line exists in the first place. However, where embryos are concerned, he has no need for veiled allusions. Analogous to my own regard of modern art, Mr. Kinsely concedes he has not the slightest idea what "personhood" is but he is positive about what it is NOT. That is the manner in which HE desires to have it both ways.
That President Bush engages in apparently contradictory positions on matters regarding prenatal care and stem cell research are not really what has Mr. Kinsley's dander up but rather that Bush refuses to see things the same way Kinsley does and with the same self-assurance in his own correctness that allows infinite shades of grey to be resolved into a sharply resolved line. Mr. Kinsley would like to damn the President's moral agonizing as "random symbolic thrusts" because if Bush's views can be portrayed as one-sided and obsessive as Kinsley's own, they provide a clear sense of enmity around which both Bush critics and pro-life critics could rally. The issue here is not that Bush is calculating confusion or even that he is of two minds about the subject. His own personal leaning are well known. Rather, it is that Bush - unlike Mr. Kinsley - is unwilling to accept his personal leanings as undisputed truth.
That President Bush's decision on stem cell research may not give the medical community (or Mr. Kinsley) all they desire is unfortunate but, before condemning Bush for fuzzy logic, Kinsely might want to consider the political courage involved in a decision that only angered Bush's conservative base as going too far yet clearly did nothing to gain him any headway with liberals. I sincerely hope that a cure will be found soon for Mr. Kinsley's Parkinson's Disease - I often read of new advances regarding its treatment. However, such cures and solutions do not come easy. They often require (agonizing) choices to be made. Mr. Kinsley wants us to lie and call such choices easy and obvious. Perhaps some Solomonic reflection is not a bad idea before we being cutting babies in half, literally and figuratively.
-- The Bell
(To reply, click here.)
If you believe an Embryo/Fetus is for all intents and purposes a person, you are cornered into outlawing the Pill, as conception is not uncommon but attachment becomes nearly impossible.
Any ethics teacher can tell you that the clearest mark of a bad bit of rhetoric is that it forces you to make analogues of actions that are clearly quite different. It takes quite a bit of tight rope walking to compare using the pill to infanticide.
That doesn't *solve* the problem, but it leaves us with two camps: those that believe that very significant changes (in terms of moral responsibilities) occur between conception and birth, and those that don't believe there are any moral changes at all.
The first group may well contain anti-abortion crusaders, cultural conservatives and the like as well as the more obvious pro-choicers. The second group, however, has a very steep hill to climb to make their point. They are much closer to the 'Sun circles the earth' crowd than they are to the average person who doesn't want their 16 year old getting an abortion without consent.
The problem is, Bush probably *is* in the first group. But the real debate will only occur when the folks who can't distinguish between genetic heritage and personhood are relegated to the sidelines. This wouldn't be that urgent if there weren't sick people waiting for a cure.
You can't have the 'get rid of all cars' people playing a serious role in an environmental debate, and you can't let the genetic fundamentalists control this one. If Bush had balls, he'd follow his instincts and aim for the middle.
-- The New Snobbery
(To reply, click here.)
(11/4)
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Remarks From The Fray
What do you mean by "solved?" I'm not seeing a solution, if by that you mean letting the "free market" run wild, which I think we can all see is where this debate is going to end eventually. This is about a lot more than what happens to discarded embryos from fertility clinics. The only limit to these technologies is in your imagination. Maybe the reason Bush prevaricates, or futzes around, or what-have-you, is because he knows perfectly well that he can't stop this no matter what he does, so why work so hard? Just lie back and enjoy it, right?
I realize that, as in First Amendment debates, it is always more fashionable to play the absolutist. Such arguments will always hold together better. But do you really want to live in that world? This is just not as easy as you make it sound. Or it should not be. And as flawed as government may be, I say, the private sector is at least as bad.
-- Ferdinanda
(To reply, click here.)
Plants will never think, Mr. Kinsley. And apes will never do surgery, hold a piano recital with meaning, or scan the morning paper for tidbits of amusement and folly.
You see, the problem with many of Michael Kinsely's posts is that sometimes they're like trying to run your hand down a rose without getting snagged on the thorns; so often and many are the thorny side notes that beg for explanation before one can move onward. This phrase in particular unravels while it is yet in construction, for example:
"Abortion is a tough question for most people, but the related issue of embryos and medical ethics can be a lot easier. It can be solved without a lot of stagy agonizing, and without trivializing other people's moral concerns, even ones you may not share. An embryo has no feelings, no self-awareness, nothing that would give anyone a concern about its welfare except for its potential to develop into something we recognize as human. Religion can give you that concern as a matter of faith, but government policy should not be based on this belief any more than on the religious belief of some people that plants have souls.."
No sir. Abortion (as well as embryonic research) is "tough" only because of pressure politics and ideology, and in the concrete, unreflective skulls those who've placed the material and health comforts of one life-stage category as being putatively better off for the efforts, as compared to the trivializing of human life on the other end of the "importance" spectrum. His denial that government can or should "pay attention" to the moral concerns of many in itself "trivializes" the very issue he says is not. Not religion or other ethereal notions that he compares with animistic primitivism akin to thinking plants have souls or are volitional entities. An embryo may have no feelings or self-awareness or whatnot, but then it WILL at some point, in all probability, whereas plants blueprints never allow for this and never will. Plants too have no "feelings", nor do bacterial infestations and hordes of flies, yet all have their place if one were to talk to those advocating protection of , say, the Amazon river basin. How much more is lost than mere bugs and weed diversity if those without a voice in the earliest stages of life are denied birth. History is unfortunately silent on those specific things, events, productions, inventions, and creative contributions of those who're never born. But the loss is no doubt there.
Whether one thinks that a Creator truly endowed humanity with gifts that place us somewhere along the ladder higher than primordial organic paste, where the animal rights radicals place all organic matter, or some other mechanistic process was at work is largely not the point here. The point Kinsley is missing is that the potential that is encoded into each human embryo is there from the outset, whereas it is not for any other creature or organism on the planet. It is this very blueprint that seems to make the ghoulish harvesting of this human flesh profitable to the medical industry. Or so we are told in confidence.
In the modernist scenario, which Kinsley seems to follow here, however, no doubt some would go the ludicrous extent of chiming in that today we must affirm that some kinds of frogs and butterflies are "logically" more worth our preservation efforts than some people's offspring. And this is what I and others were afraid might happen someday. There can be no complete "hightening" of the animal kingdom to make them have par with humanity. There can only be a digression of the human realm down to the level of the mere animal. Cells are cells, after all. Right?
-- Wakefield Tolbert
(To reply, click here.)
Mr. Kinsley wants hypocritical arguments to condemn, he need look no further than the position he presumably supports. Indeed, the bright and shining - albeit necessary - lie of Roe v. Wade has always been that there is some bright line separating the point at which human potentiality is magically transmuted into humanity as well as that line being best drawn at the end of the first trimester, the "quickening," or any other (historical) standards of common law.
It is all quite a matter of black and white for Kinsley. He "admits" the line between a fetus and "real personhood" is hard to distinguish, never feeling the need to acknowledge his tacit assumption that such a line exists in the first place. However, where embryos are concerned, he has no need for veiled allusions. Analogous to my own regard of modern art, Mr. Kinsely concedes he has not the slightest idea what "personhood" is but he is positive about what it is NOT. That is the manner in which HE desires to have it both ways.
That President Bush engages in apparently contradictory positions on matters regarding prenatal care and stem cell research are not really what has Mr. Kinsley's dander up but rather that Bush refuses to see things the same way Kinsley does and with the same self-assurance in his own correctness that allows infinite shades of grey to be resolved into a sharply resolved line. Mr. Kinsley would like to damn the President's moral agonizing as "random symbolic thrusts" because if Bush's views can be portrayed as one-sided and obsessive as Kinsley's own, they provide a clear sense of enmity around which both Bush critics and pro-life critics could rally. The issue here is not that Bush is calculating confusion or even that he is of two minds about the subject. His own personal leaning are well known. Rather, it is that Bush - unlike Mr. Kinsley - is unwilling to accept his personal leanings as undisputed truth.
That President Bush's decision on stem cell research may not give the medical community (or Mr. Kinsley) all they desire is unfortunate but, before condemning Bush for fuzzy logic, Kinsely might want to consider the political courage involved in a decision that only angered Bush's conservative base as going too far yet clearly did nothing to gain him any headway with liberals. I sincerely hope that a cure will be found soon for Mr. Kinsley's Parkinson's Disease - I often read of new advances regarding its treatment. However, such cures and solutions do not come easy. They often require (agonizing) choices to be made. Mr. Kinsley wants us to lie and call such choices easy and obvious. Perhaps some Solomonic reflection is not a bad idea before we being cutting babies in half, literally and figuratively.
-- The Bell
(To reply, click here.)
If you believe an Embryo/Fetus is for all intents and purposes a person, you are cornered into outlawing the Pill, as conception is not uncommon but attachment becomes nearly impossible.
Any ethics teacher can tell you that the clearest mark of a bad bit of rhetoric is that it forces you to make analogues of actions that are clearly quite different. It takes quite a bit of tight rope walking to compare using the pill to infanticide.
That doesn't *solve* the problem, but it leaves us with two camps: those that believe that very significant changes (in terms of moral responsibilities) occur between conception and birth, and those that don't believe there are any moral changes at all.
The first group may well contain anti-abortion crusaders, cultural conservatives and the like as well as the more obvious pro-choicers. The second group, however, has a very steep hill to climb to make their point. They are much closer to the 'Sun circles the earth' crowd than they are to the average person who doesn't want their 16 year old getting an abortion without consent.
The problem is, Bush probably *is* in the first group. But the real debate will only occur when the folks who can't distinguish between genetic heritage and personhood are relegated to the sidelines. This wouldn't be that urgent if there weren't sick people waiting for a cure.
You can't have the 'get rid of all cars' people playing a serious role in an environmental debate, and you can't let the genetic fundamentalists control this one. If Bush had balls, he'd follow his instincts and aim for the middle.
-- The New Snobbery
(To reply, click here.)
(11/4)