Posted on 10/20/2004 10:42:20 AM PDT by MisterRepublican
Michael J. Fox is a famous TV and movie star. He is witty. He is charming. A few years ago, we learned he has Parkinson's disease.
PD is a slowly progressive neurological disorder, characterized by tremors, shuffling gait, a masklike facial expression, "pill rolling" of the fingers, drooling, intolerance to heat, oily skin, emotional instability and defective judgment (although intelligence is rarely impaired).
PD is currently incurable, although there are several methods to slow its advancement, including drug therapy and surgery.
PD is tragic, particularly in Fox's case, because it rarely afflicts persons under 60 years old.
Yet everyone faces tragedy at one time or another, in one form or another. A person's moral fiber is revealed in tragedy.
So we learned through Fox's affliction that he has either extremely poor judgment or a diabolical character flaw. He supports human embryonic stem-cell experimentation, thus contending that some humans are subhuman and expendable for others' personal gain.
(Excerpt) Read more at worldnetdaily.com ...
The law is a human construct. With the right mandate, anything can be "legal."
I guess that's what it's like to have no absolutes, no morals.
SD
Can't legislate morality. It's hopelessly intertwined with religion, which our founding fathers wisely chose to prohibit from being established by government. There are a lot of things I think should be legal, that I don't think are moral.
It is unfortunate what happened to him. I did read somewhere that pd. can be brought on by drinking large amounts of diet soda. I don't know how true that is, but I do know that aspartame is some "bad stuff" so is splenda. Long term effects from artificial sweetners is not so sweet.
yeah if socialized medicine is so great, maybe they can work the miracle cure.
>>> Of course, a lot of people make the argument that a quadrapalegic or somebody with Parkinson's is a life form with less value than a "normal" human being.
Did I make that argument? If I did, it was a typo. I was talking about frozen embryos.
Well said bump.
I would call it ghoulish, creepy not cannibalism.
I did not mean to mischaracterize your argument. I was just talking about the fact that many people have assigned widely varying values to different forms of human life. I did not mean to imply that you have in any way denigrated the sick or those with handicaps.
To me, it all comes down to the why a person values life.
If human life is a gift from God and all humans are endowed with a soul that is precious to the Creator, it seems that it would be impossible to say that the soul exists at one point and not another, so it is important to err on the side of caution.
If human life is based on a condition of being what we would normally think of as a sentient human, that a person is the sum of what he does and thinks and physically is, then it is pretty clear that a blastocyst does not have the same capacity as a human adult.
The problem with the latter argument is that there are a whole lot of conditions that do not have the same capacity as a human adult. There is severe retardation, coma or debilitating terminal disease. The question is where one draws the line.
But when we draw lines, we presume a lot.
The President's policy on embryonic stem cell research has nothing to do with legality. It has to do with federal funding.
Very true. And as soon as we eliminate federal funding for all other types of medical research that aren't legitimate national security issues, I'll be happy to see funding for embryonic stem cell research eliminated too. I'm thoroughly opposed to socialism in all its forms, but as long as I'm stuck with it, I don't want it taking my money and then discriminating against funding for things that I want to see done.
"...and loving it"
Someone correct me if I am wrong, but I think I heard at some point that Justin Bateman is conservative. I know she became a Christian sometime in the 90's, I think. She played Mallory.
Letting people do embryonic stem cell research is based on an argument of freedom; that the government will not step in to stop people from doing this research.
Funding embryonic stem cell research would be based on an argument of utility; that the government finds this research worthwhile, on balance.
There is a world of difference between the two. This research falls into the grey area between "should be banned" and "should be funded". Given the moral minefields, I feel the President made the right call.
Of course we legislate morality. What can't be legislated against is things that lack a sufficient mandate. If people in large agreed that, e.g. alcohol was bad for society, then prohibition would have worked. They didn't, it didn't.
People, by and large, believe that it is immoral to rape, so we have laws against it. They absolutely stem from a moral basis.
People once thought adultery was important enough of a harm to society to have criminal statutes against it. This mandate has pretty much fallen by the wayside.
So the question of whether embryonic stem cell research should or should not be allowed (or funded) is based on a general mandate, a sense of the people. It has nothing to do with the trite statement that you "can't legislate morality."
Hell, the various incentives in the US code are nothing other than various attempts to impose a moral view on others, from subsidising home ownership and children to forbidding 3.5 gallon toilets. These are all decisions made to influence behavior based on an ethic, a belief, a moral system.
SD
And what if consen/non-consent is not readily available?
Should the government then have the right, in the name of hoping to find a cure for dreaded diseases, to destroy a human life?
I don't know how a human embryo could ever give its consent to having its life destroyed.
Perhaps you could enlighten me on that.
The answer to your question was contained in my original post. You excerpted only the part that didn't answer the question, and then asked the question. Weird.
My bad. You must mean, then, that this is your answer to my question: "For anyone who never reached that stage (embryo, anencephalic, profoundly retarded, etc.), I would delegate the decision to the parents."
Help me out here.
Are you suggesting that you would allow parents to legally sacrifice their own children? Children, as best I recall, are n ot legally capable of giving consent. Healthy children, for instance, cannot legally consent to surgery.
I think I understand you to say that you would allow the parents of embryos to sacrifice those healthy embryos to research.
And I think I understand you to say that you would likewise allow parents to give their consent to have children who have severe birth anomolies (including, perhaps, Downs Syndrome with profound retardation??) also be sacrificed on the altar of scientific research.
But what about healthy children? Should there be any restrictions, in your view, on the right of parents to give their consent to have those human beings sacrificed, if doing so might lead to a cure to Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's Disease??
Embryos do not have the capacity for awareness or sensation, and are thus very different from late-stage fetuses or already born children. The difference may not matter to you, but it matters to a lot of us. It also matters to a creature which is experiencing pain. I certainly think parents are much better suited than the government to decide what to do with their excess embryos.
I would also be happy to let parents decide what to do with full-term anencephalic babies, some of whom have a partial brainstem and thus don't immediately qualify as clinically brain-dead, but who have no possibility of ever developing awareness or sensation, and will inevitably die shortly. If parents want to hasten the death of these unfortunate creatures, in order to maximize the number of lives that may saved with their organs, that should be their prerogative, as the infant in question will never be in a position to consent or not consent.
We have to be willing to make some value judgements. It's just a cop-out to insist on reducing all the tremendous complexities of life to black-and-white. The animal rights extremists do this cop-out. According to them, since animals cannot comprehend medical research and thus cannot consent to be used in it, we may never use an animal in research (much less for food), no matter how great the good that might come of it, nor how minimal the suffering might be for any particular research project. In my book, the embryo rights extremists are just as irrational and impractical as the animal rights extremists.
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