Embryos and ethics

Boston Globe ^ | 3/15/09 | Jeff Jacoby

[MartinaMisc]

SHORTLY AFTER the president announced his new policy on funding embryonic stem-cell research, CNN's Larry King devoted a special program to the subject. His first guest was Mary Tyler Moore, the international chairwoman of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation who has long been involved in raising funds and awareness for the treatment of Type 1 diabetes, a disease for which there is still no cure.

"I am so pleased with the thought and care that he put into making this decision. I think it's a good one," Moore told King. "What's wonderful too is that this means that the United States will maintain its leadership in things medical and scientific."

Moore's words of praise might not strike you as exceptional, given the widespread approval last week of President Obama's order reversing the Bush administration's restrictions. But Moore wasn't speaking about Obama. Her interview on "Larry King Live" followed President Bush's stem-cell decision, which was announced in a televised address on Aug. 9, 2001. Also joining the conversation that night was Christopher Reeve. His take on Bush's policy was "a little bit more mixed," he acknowledged. "However, I think it is a step in the right direction. I'm grateful for that to the president."

For eight years Bush's foes caricatured him as a Bible-thumping yahoo for whom ideology routinely trumped science, so it might be difficult to remember that the policy he articulated in 2001 was anything but a knee-jerk rejection of scientific progress. The commentator Charles Krauthammer - a graduate of Harvard Medical School, a quadriplegic, and a former member of the President's Council on Bioethics who did not agree with Bush's decision - recalled it a few days ago as "the single most morally serious presidential speech on medical ethics ever given."

[Past Your Eyes]

Contrast that to my idiotic junior senator (Jeanne Shaheen [it pains me to say her name]) with her cute little diabetic granddaughter that they dutifully trotted out to proclaim the wonderful hope they now had in Obama’s signing. Prior to that, apparently they were in the depths of despair because mean old Bush wanted this little girl to suffer the rest of her life. Made me want to puke.

[HoosierHawk]

"If human embryonic stem-cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable," Dr. James Thomson, the pioneer of embryonic stem-cell science, said in 2007, "you have not thought about it enough."

I haven't figured out whether Obama is morally bankrupt or intellectually lazy. Probably both.

[SumProVita]

“I haven’t figured out whether Obama is morally bankrupt or intellectually lazy. Probably both.”

I think it would be accurate to say that he is deceived. His own choices and personal anger have opened him to such deception.

[don-o]

"Like most Americans, I don't believe that microscopic human embryos deserve all the legal protections of personhood."

I'm glad Jacoby wrote this; but I question if he has done all his thinking on it. If a "microscopic human embryo" lacks personhood, it follows that such status is endowed at some time in the growth process. What he has not declared is when this time is.

It really does not matter when it is, though. If the legal protection is to be endowed by man (as opposed to the natural rights that the Founders understood), then they are arbitrary and changeable and revocable.

[don-o]

And speaking of thinking the thing all the way through, RightWingBob asks the question about Obama's declaration to not open the door to human cloning.

"Why not?"

[cthemfly25]

I believe obama is a Marxist ideologue without compare. There is no reason to fund with taxpayer dollars embryonic breeding and unrestricted global abortion. He is the president of the culture of death.

[HoosierHawk]

But he thinks he can deceive others with empty rhetoric. I actually watched part of his speech the other day. I had to turn it off.

He didn't address adult stem-cell research, any moral implications of embryonic stem-cell research, nothing.

"There's just a bunch of flat-earthers standing in the way of science," was the gist of it.

[SumProVita]

Honestly, I have never been very impressed with his speeches. They are all far too general and loftily VAGUE.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Ah, let me get this straight: Banning research on embryonic stem cells "puts ideology and politics over scientific progress," but human cloning must be banned because it is "profoundly wrong."

I must have missed something here. Can someone please explain why Obama's judgments about right and wrong are profound moral insights that we must all live by, but YOUR judgments and MY judgments about right and wrong are "ideology and politics"?

And besides, as others have pointed out, it's a verbal shell game.

His definition of "reproductive cloning" means starting tiny cloned human beings ---and then nurturing them until they're toddling about and saying "Mama."

He says this kind of cloning is "morally wrong". (And I strongly agree: reproductive cloning is wrong, for reasons I can explain if anyone is interested in pursuing a line of thought based on logical consequences, reasonable inferences, and objective facts.)

But his definition of "research" or "therapeutic" cloning means starting tiny cloned human beings --- the immature young of a human father and mother --- and then experimenting on them or extracting materials from them until they are dead.

He says THIS kind of cloning is "morally right".

And he does not attempt for even one paragraph to think his way though, and persuasivly present, a sustained process of moral reasoning.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

He hasn't just given short shrift to Faith and God. More serious, from a this-worldly point of view, is that he has abandoned rational argument and humanity itself.

[don-o]

ping

JJ is on the right track here.