Posted on 01/10/2007 3:37:55 PM PST by wagglebee
Pro-Life Ping
You beat me to it. Almost exactly what I was going to say. Thanks.
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Placemarker ... more later.
We won one.
Wow. Just...wow. But will it change anything?
If embryos are human, women should carry every egg they produce to term. After all, they are human beings, and not doing so is a conscious decision to destroy human life. The women ahould be pregnant from their to first to menopause. /sarc, just in case/
Bump
You are grossly mistaken. Your problem centers on the confusion between organ (or cell subunit of same) and ORGANISM.
I don't think there is much question that this being released today, is telling us, he will be using that veto pen if he needs to.
Like it matters. Harvesting Stem Cells from live born babies who are murdered and mutilated to get the stem cells is becoming common practice.
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2006/dec/06121202.html
Liberals are intent on spreading a culture of death in the U.S.
I'll take any win we can get!!!!!
Whats it all about, Alfie? Why the fuss over embryonic stem cells?
News/Current Events Free Republic Keywords: EMBRYONIC STEM CELLS, ABORTION, CLONING
Published at FreeRepublic.com : 8/16/2001
There is often a way to simplify a complex issues. With the current debate on embryonic stem cell research this is not the case, for the issues are tied up in a Gordian knot having moral, ethical, medical, scientific, and political strands. With the indulgence of my fellow Freeperswhose opinions and input I value far above the agenda-laden mediaI will attempt to give some clarification on the goals of embryonic stem cell researchers and other implications found in the twisted strands.
To be fair, I shall start by stating my belief regarding individual human life it helps readers to pigeonhole the author if they dont wish to think through the offered thoughts and want to post opinions and responses anyway.
I believe the life of every individual human being alive began with their conception, whether in a petri dish (Orrin Hatchlings opinion not withstanding), the pelvic cavity, fallopian tube, or uterus of their mother. To my mind, individual life in the body begins at conception and follows a God-ordained continuum of unknown length; its a sure bet the individual identity in the body starts with conception, somewhere. To me, the moral and ethical questions regarding embryonic stem cell research center on answering the notions of whether it is wrong or merely discomforting to use the cells of embryos who were killed for their body partsthats what the embryonic stem cells are in the final analysis, the body parts of embryos, individual human embryos, and thats how we ought identify them in a pro-life mode.
So, what is it the researchers want to do with stem cells harvested from embryos? Well, there are several possibilities:
***** 1- the cell lines would be studied to understand how embryonic cells transition from pluripotent into slightly differentiated multipotent cells that give rise to the specific tissue lines such as blood, muscle, neurons, etc. (transition from cells able to turn into any of the more than 250 tissue cells of the human bodypluripotent cellsinto the more differentiated cells of specific tissue lines);
***** 2- the cell lines would be studied and cultured to produce tissue lines closely matched to tissues of ethnic/racial groups, from which tissue banks of less rejection-prone organs and tissues might be implanted in patients to effect cures of diseases and accident complications such as Nick Bonacontis son suffered to his spine during a football game;
***** 3- the cells of embryos would be stripped of their DNA (nuclear material taken out in a process called enucleation) and the DNA of a donor/patient would be implanted and then the cells cultured and reproduced then differentiated to produce more histocompatible tissues for treatments (histocompatible means little or no anti-rejection meds after surgery)
There may be other goals, but those three are the main directions researchers might take with embryonic stem cell lines. Please note, only the first would be undertaken without necessitating the killing of more embryos, using only the cell lines established by earlier killing of in vitro fertilization clinic embryosits the 43rd presidents proposal, in a nutshell, to limit the exploitation to the lines already established, banning any further killing to harvest body parts as the 1995 law enumerated as below. The other two approaches would almost certainly require a much larger variety of embryonic stem cells and thus require extensive killing (scientists might use the term sacrificing or utilization instead of killing; the act is the same to this author, the killing of the individual human embryo to harvest its body parts). Number three would require a nearly continuous supply of embryos for their body parts, in order to as closely as possible match the antigens and proteins of the to be implanted patient.
Well, you might ask, why open this Pandoras box at all? Sadly, the box was opened decades ago, when in vitro fertilization began to conceive extra embryos, to make clinic fertilization procedure more cost effective, with the resultant leftover embryos being stored in liquid nitrogen tanks. [To this writer, that is the base wrong at the heart of all this harangue, and IVF ought be regulated to avoid such an obscenity to human life. IVF came before the Roe decision and may have contributed heavily to the cheapening of pre-birth human life. Its hard for me to believe the IVF clinics thought the embryos were individual human beings because the implications of that and the crass processing of the embryos not implanted to become babies nine months later would fit too closely with the antithetical notions of Nazi horrors. Well return to this notion in a minute.]
During the second term of the 42nd president the United States Congress wrote and passed a law against killing humans for harvesting, but the 42nd president skirted this late in his term, assuming the embryos in nitrogen tanks were not human beings, extending federal grant programs to utilize these ill-defined globs of individual human parts for researchBill Clinton used his executive position to open the door for thawing and or creating embryos, killing and harvesting their body parts, but didnt fight the battle for funding; no doubt he is in the camp that do not consider the embryos to be individual human beings at their earliest developmental stage as Jerrold Nadler, Mary Tyler Moore, Orrin Hatch, and others have so flatly put it, theyre not humans if not in a womb; which implies sanction for the slaughter of tens of millions who are human because theyre in wombs, but we wont fight that battle today. It is my understanding that the first cell lines created from human embryonic bodies of in vitro clinics were isolated in 1998 (by Geron, I think), but it is well to note that as far back as the late seventies, companies like Merck were taking tissue from aborted fetuses (lung and kidney tissues) for a form of cell regeneration (cloning specific tissues rather than whole persons, as in choice # 3 above, but using lung cells not embryonic cells) to create vaccines.
There are vaccines for polio, chicken pox, measles, mumps, and hepatitis routinely injected today that are creations derived from harvested human tissue of selectively aborted pre-born individual humans. As many are aware, there are now institutions purchasing embryos and eggs (the oocyte, female cell that is half of the conception process) destined for conceiving embryos for harvesting. The Pandoras box of exploitation on killed then harvested human tissues has already begun, without government controls or laws as guidelines, though some would split hairs over tissue taken from aborted individual human beings, ignoring the undeniable truth that tissue harvesting is to some measuring driving the late term abortion statistics (and is therefore a heinous practice, in my book, far more inveigle of evil than harvesting frozen embryonic bodies, but these are degrees we fight over).
We might ask ourselves what would have been the best possible policy from the 43rd president, regarding stem cell research? Many will quickly say a flat ban on embryonic stem cells, whether as cell lines derived from embryos killed years agobefore the president offered his speechor as a complete ban on killing any more embryos for their body parts. Some would say that embryos in nitrogen tanks arent individual humans, so harvest away, the more the better. There are a couple of other extreme notions, but they involve reproductive cloning and we wont get into that sheepshank knot.
Lets see if we can discern degrees of this argument. Could we say, A) banning all stem cell research would be the most extreme? Would banning B) only embryonic stem cell research be the next level? Then, would allowing C) embryonic stem cell research on JUST the cell lines already derived from the wrongful killing of embryos be next? Perhaps not banning D) research with the frozen embryos not implanted in wombs might be next, allowing the killing of as many as deemed needed from the nitrogen tanks. Finally, we would hear E) allowing any research with human embryos, allowing conception and killing at the whim of the researchers.
Selection E (and possibly D) above would be the brave new world of human exploitation, as far as this writer is concerned, for it would completely deny that individual human embryos are humans, it would allow all manner of dangerous research on genetic manipulation with living human tissues such that the most efficient weapons to decimate a racial grouping would be eventually isolated (and this may have already happened in secret US and other national labs around the world, make no mistake). To reject selection E is also to accept the notion that it is wrong to create human life for experimentation and exploitation.
Along the slippery slope of selection E lies acceptance of human cloning. Some scientists are already making the case for selective human tissue cloning, and as Ive noted above, this procedure has already been undertaken with the production of certain vaccines now being routinely injected. We are already on this slippery slope. The question is, How do we stop the madness before it reaches the more obvious horrors of cloning for body parts?
I tell you of a truth, this is already what the vaccine production labs have accomplished. The only clarification is, the cloning is of specific tissues (euphemistically called therapeutic cloning), not whole bodies or whole organs (euphemistically called reproductive cloning). Harken back to direction number 3 above, the enucleation and nuclear fusion using embryonic stem cells. That is the next step in designer organs and tissues. The more difficult task will be to avoid choices 2 and 3 and take only choice number 1, to eventually use the patients own stem cells for their specific tissues and organs without using embryonic individual lives. Choices 2 and 3 are within researchers grasps, as evidenced by the cry for more embryos from the nitrogen tanks. Choice 1 is the true holy grail of scientific medicine, for it will conflict with no moral or ethical standards as now established and will take our culture a step back from the horrors awaiting us with human cloning for body parts.
tagged for later reading.
"DUH!!!"
Too bad millions had to die before there was "enlightenment". Seems like we've been saying this for quite some time.
nice
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