. . . We've suspected for many years that certain folks like to kill babies. We always felt a little shrill thinking such a thing, but there's evidence for it, including this:
Appearing before the Senate Labor, Health and Human Services subcommittee last week, Dr. William Hurlbut, a professor in the Human Biology program at Stanford and a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, outlined a number of scientific methods for obtaining embryonic stem cells without destroying developing human embryos.
This is big news. Yet Sen. Tom Harkin, Iowa Democrat, displaying a prodigious capacity for missing the point, brushed it off, declaring: "We already know how to derive stem cells."
Well, yes, but the argument we are engaged in concerns whether it is moral or ethical to use normal, fully functioning human embryos as mere research material. If we can produce embryonic stem cells some other way, we will be able to obtain the full benefits of medical research using these cells (bearing in mind the potential for cures has been wildly oversold by advocates) without transgressing important moral boundaries.
Not so very long ago, Democrats expressed moral qualms about harvesting human embryos for research. In 1999, President Clinton's National Bioethics Advisory Commission issued a report on "Ethical Issues in Human Stem Cell Research" and cautioned, "In our judgment, the derivation of stem cells from embryos remaining following infertility treatments is justifiable only if no less morally problematic alternatives are available for advancing the research." Yet today, only six years later, those who raise ethical objections to unrestricted embryonic stem cell research are dismissed as troglodytes. And those who propound alternatives to destroying human embryos must struggle to get a hearing.
Link.
