Hope your remarks were sarcasm!
Not so much sarcasm, as an effort to state the opposition’s POV. Really, I think that’s what it comes down to. It can’t be that embryonic stem cell research is all that important; other developments suggest it’s a dead end, uh, so to speak.
But they cannot allow any law that suggests that a human embryo has civil rights, because it might impinge on a woman’s right to commit infanticide. The mere possibility of such an impingement is intolerable to them.
My latest theory is that it all comes out of the so-called scientific thinking of the 19th century (the same thinking that justified racism and slavery) and utilitarianism, a movement which trashed education by suggesting that the goal of education is NOT to make free adults but to make economically contributing adults.
Humans, in this view, are only worth what others think they are worth — the value theory of economics applied to embryos, fetuses, and humans in general.