January 20th, 2008
Will clones end the abortion debate?
A few weeks ago I wrote here that the stem cell debate will continue, despite the success in pulling stem cells from 8-cell embryos, and despite the success of turning skin cells into stem cells.
Moral debates seldom yield to scientific fact.
So the question which leads this post is facetious. The abortion debate will not end just because scientists have created viable embryos from skin.
But consider. If a fertilized egg is a human life, because that fertilized egg could become a human being, what are these new blastocysts Stemagen of San Diego created? (I should note the viability of these blastocysts has not yet been determined.)
And if this blastocyst is not human, if it has no rights, when might it earn them? When it’s allowed to develop into a recognizable shape, so we can take its picture by ultrasound, and use that to manipulate your feelings?
Personally, I have no problems with stem cell science. I recognize human life when it’s viable, unaided, outside the womb environment, with the brain and circulatory structure God gives us in the last trimester. Life and humanity are different things.
That’s where U.S. law stands today. That’s the compromise of Roe vs. Wade, which was settled January 22, 1973, 35 years ago this Tuesday.
Three months for the mother, three for the doctor, three for the state, although in practice the doctor generally sides with the patient.
The point is that if you’re going to change that now, if you’re going to demand human rights for blastocysts, and force women at the point of a gun (if necessary) to bear children they don’t want, science is going to take you down a nasty rabbit hole.
That trip has already begun.
I’m certain one answer to this question is to simply deny science. Forbid cloning, forbid stem cell research, forbid learning evolution if you have to.
But I didn’t expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition. No one ever does.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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