I do not understand why the media seems to avoid discussing the source of the embryos that are being requested for research purposes, but to date, I have never heard it discussed when they do report the latest on its progress.
I understand a need to get the law right and perhaps that is all that is currently going on at this point and time, I doubt any of us really know, that are not directly involved. I just think if the media would be clearer about discussing the source of the embryos, our common sense, as far as the public being aware, would be clearer as well as our knowledge on the progress of it. Not to mention the public feeling more accepting of it.
Couples or unmarried individuals that can not get pregnant the old fashion way many times will have the fertilized egg or embryos frozen and for many reasons decide not to use them. They may have as many as 50 or 60 harvested and it only requires 10 to have their baby or family. They may be going to have chemo and want their eggs removed for a later time when they have recovered or they may break up and no longer want to have a baby together. The reasons that they choose to discontinue the service is as many and varied as there are people.
Today they have the option to either continue keeping the embryos frozen or to have them destroyed. For many the decision is to have them destroyed so thousands if not millions get destroyed on a yearly basis with or without the current law being debated. Apparently no one has decided to interfere with the people’s right to destroy them but only to gift them to research. Many couples and persons, themselves, would choose to give them to research rather than to have them outwardly destroyed knowing the value they could have in the potential cure of disease and injury but that has not been an option, in the past.
There are presently 200 research programs, with 50 more waiting for approval, hanging on the decision made by the judge currently trying to stop the progress of the research. It was voted against by the Republican majority for 8 years due to the pressure of the Churches on it during the Bush Administration and one of the first things signed into law by the OBama Administration.
For the moment it does not stop the program but certainly everyone is nervous that it will come to an abrupt stop. Although without the research currently being done no one can be certain, it looks very hopeful as a long-lasting cure for many diseases and accidents from Parkinsons to spinal cord injuries. The longer it gets stalled in the Court system the longer it will be before anyone does have any real answers.
It makes, and never has made any sense to me, that it is o.k. for couples to have the embryos destroyed but it is not o.k. to have them signed over for research purposes where they may end up helping millions of people who have never had help or hope, in the history of medicine, for a cure that will give them both an extended life and a less challenging life. This area of health has had extremely little to no hope even for effective treatment much less cure.
All Doctors trained to find medical miracles have had at their core of training, the use of a human cadaver at some point in their medical career since the beginning of the study of medicine. If we can find dignity in the use of the human body for training in our medical fields then shouldn’t an egg be able to be treated with the same dignity or morality? No surgeon will ever practice his skills without first training them on the use of a human body that has been left to Science to train their lifesaving techniques.
For those that would use the reasoning of morality, it falls short in my estimation, when human bodies as well as human and animal parts are being used to train our medical Doctors as well as transplanted into other humans and have been both acceptable as well as moral ways of treating people to prolong life going back to the beginning of medicine. How can stem cell use for research be immoral when it is used to bring both hope and comfort for a longer and more comfortable life to the suffering? Medicine risk human life daily in an effort to improve or save life and it is considered both moral and humane if the alternative means even more certain maiming or death.
If conception in a petri dish between unmarried couples, donating our bodies to science, our organs for transplant, our bodies kept alive on machines or poisoned as in cancer treatments, or animal and mechanical parts for replacement to the human body for the sake of producing or prolonging life have been recognized as moral then this too should be recognized as moral. Since when has maintaining compassion and empathy for the human race when it does not mean the risk of human life not become moral?
No one is even thinking, much less speaking of developing new embryos for research purposes. I hope as a compassionate America, the law is only being firmed up but with the intolerance for people who suffer, that is currently happening in today’s environment, it smells a great deal more, like politics of the right-wing and therefore special interests, as usual.
You are dealing with the religious right here, and also, to some extent mainstream Christianity. They simply want things their way, regardless of any logic to the contrary. After all, these people take the Bible word-for-word, so a little incongruity is acceptable to them at all times.
They claim their issue is a moral one, and not religion-based. this is nonsense and the stem cell research resistance promulgated by these groups now gives us all a chance to look at who these people are and what they really are about, and hopefully stop them before they really do become our oppressors. Essentially there is a Federal law denying funding to any research that kills an embryo. As they believe stem cell research does so, they oppose it.
The mere fact that it takes life to create life escapes them. The embryo starts out as what we know as a zygote and begins differentiation. This process does, also, in fact kill the embryo, and there comes a point where the embryo can no longer be found. In other words, it has died into a new form of existence. So it is with creating stem cells from embryos. The process changes the embryo into some of the most powerful cells in the Universe. One could more accurately name stem cells, the God cell as it can become any form of living tissue.
Natural reproduction eventually creates a process in which the embryo disappears. It dies. Shall we then outlaw sex among a man and woman because they initiate a process that ultimately kills an embryo. Shall we get really big around this issue and deny federal funds to any organization employing people with children as such people have engaged in an act that killed embryos.
Resistance to stem cell research is based on fallacious arguments, and by people who are as likely to believe in the Easter Bunny as Jesus Christ. We need to watch these folks very carefully as a large part of their agenda is to be exempt from certain laws while the rest of us remain restricted by those laws.
Thank you for your comment. Everyone is entitled to their point of view on my blog whether I agree with it or not. Last time I checked that was what Democracy represented.