Culture of Life

Bush is continuing his threats to veto another stem cell bill that was passed by the Senate earlier this week. He's calling for a culture of life. That sounds nice. You know what else would be nice? A culture of rationality, sanity, a willingness to help stop suffering, and avoiding pointless pandering to special interest groups. Wouldn't that be nice too?

Let's take a look at what we know and don't know: The current bill passed by the Senate deals with the use of frozen human embryos for stem cell research. Nobody knows how many frozen embryos exist in this country, but in 2003 the Rand Corporation estimated the number at 400,000. These embryos are created at fertility clinics for people who want to be artificially inseminated. Because of the risk and complexity of the procedure, many more embryos are created than can actually be implanted, so there is always an excess. All these embryos are frozen, and maintaining them in this frozen state costs money. The Weill-Cornell clinic in New York has stated that 54% of their patients ask that excess embryos be destroyed. They no longer have a use for them, don't want them donated to research, don't wnt them implanted in other women, and they don't want to pay to store them indefinitely. 43% donate them to basic science unrelated to stem cells, and 3% offer them to other infertile couples. Let's assume these numbers extrapolate to the rest of the country. (If anyone has better data, I'll be happy to use it.) That means that 1/2 of these embryos are being thrown away, and only 3% of them are will potentially become viable fetuses.

That means that 97% of these embryos have no chance to become living, breathing, human beings. So Bush, and others opposed to human stem cell lines, appear to be saying that because they value the "culture of life" so much, they'd rather see these embryos end up in the trash than have them cure disease or reduce human suffering. Culture of waste, culture of cruelty, culture of close-mindedness, or culture of disease would all seem to be more apt descriptions.

Bush would rather pander to the position of his base, the religious right, than do what's best for people suffering from terrible diseases. If embryos are in fact little human lives, how is it not far more wasteful to simply discard them than to use them to save other lives? And if the stem cells that could be generated from those embryos can save lives, aren't we also sentencing those with illnesses that won't be cured to shorter lives, and more pain and suffering? Let me ask those who agree with Bush - what is the better use of a an embryo that is destined for the trash can? What would Jesus do? What should Bush do?

And speaking of being pro-life, it's always struck me as odd that pro-life protesters spend all their time picketing family planning clinics who perform abortions but not fertility clinics producing hundreds of thousands of embryos that will be destroyed. If a fertilized embryo really has the same rights as a fetus or a baby, as pro-lifers contend, these discarded embryos represent a huge loss of human life. So why are they not appealing to congress to shut down fertility clinics? Why no demands for federal funding to keep the embryos frozen indefinitely? Why is nobody insisting that the owners/parents of these embryos shouldn't have the right to determine their fate? If they can't toss aside born children, why are they allowed to create excess embryos knowing most of them will be flushed away in the hopes of creating one child? Why aren't pro-life activists focusing their efforts on all the poor frozen embryos?

The reason, I believe, is that the pro-life movement really isn't about saving the lives of unborn children. It's about controlling people's bodies, and determining who has the right to terminate a pregnancy - the mother or the government. It's also about getting other people to think with a similar mindset to theirs. They aren't concerned about parents deciding to throw away a few dozen embryos. But they are very concerned about someone deciding to remove a single embryo from her body.