Bush vetoes Stem Cell Research

[Proteus_MST]

Originally posted by AnnC
This response is a bit late - I haven't looked at this thread in days.

Proteus, do you think it's just that religious-right types are uninformed and that they would more actively oppose IVF if they understood that standard IVF procedures are designed to create excess embryos which subsequently get destroyed?

To be honest, I think that often enough they want to stay uninformed (at least if we speak of the leaders of the religious right), just because of the reason that they have to present their followers an alternative to wasting these embryos for research.

If I might draw a comparison between the Gulf war just a couple of years ago:
The supporters of the war (including the US press which supported the war [i.e. the opinion makers]) just failed to ask Bushs government the right question and to delve deeper into the claim that Iraq has WMDs (and that Saddam supports Al Quaeda which was another claim by Bush ).
Because they wanted to believe that Bushs reasons for war were correct (and not fabricated lies) they shied back from asking too much.

Or for another example (something which was written by a biologist):
There was a popular creationist who traveled through the USA and held lectures about why the theory of evolution is wrong (and the story of creation written within the bible is correct).
And this biologist would often visit his lectures and would successfully refute many of the claims this creationists made.
The creationist always agreed that, indeed, the biologist is correct and that he had refuted these (the creationists) claims against the ToE, but nevertheless, in his next lecture he would repeat the same claims which the biologist refuted the lecture before.
The biologist and the creationist even had personal eMail contact for a short time, until the biologist decided that it was hopeless, as for the biologist it seemed like the creatiopnist had a mental blockade which would prevent himfromremembering all counterarguments against creationism (or all arguments against his counterarguments against the theory of evolution).
(I read this on the homepage of this biologist some time ago, but I don´t have the URL anymore)

These examples describe 2 kinds of being uninformed because of your own beliefs, the first one is that people because of their beliefs fail to ask the right questions and research the pros as wells as the contras for a certain thing,while the second example describes staying uninformed despite having all information at hand which refute certain beliefs.

I think that in many cases people (and opinion makers) of the religious right (which are against stem cell research) are uninformed because they want to believe that IVF is the perfect solution for the problem what to do with the embryos and they want to believe that this means that each embryo is used as long as there are enough parents to adopt one and of course they want to believe, that in this process not a single embryo is wasted.

I don´t know what would happen if you confronted these people (especially the die hardest supporters of IVF within the religious right) with the full details of the IVF process (also outlining the problems in a way that even layman could understand it).
Perhaps lots of them would gain new knowledge and understand that even this solution isn´t a perfect solution to the problem (and would probably understand that the process would have to be more regulated) but perhaps a couple of the IVF-Supporters would be like the person in example 2.

[Odin]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger

As far as I remember, even when an embryo is a blob of four cells, each cell is already earmarked to become some part of the body. If you remove one, a large large of the body would be missing, so you might as well disassemble the thing and use all four cells.

Thats only for the protostome branch of the Animal kingdom (earthworms, mollusks, arthropods, roundworms, etc.), which have determinate cleavage. Us deuterostomes have indeterminate cleavage, you can spit an early embyo in half and get two normal babies, spontaneous spit embyos is what gives us identical twins.


BTW, Question for BK, if ensoulment occurs at conception then do identical twins share a single soul?

[Terra Nullius]

Originally posted by Arrian
I wouldn't be surprised if the religious right wanted to ban IVF, Odin.

-Arrian

... and here woz I thinking "religious right" is an oxymoron.

[Terra Nullius]

Originally posted by Oerdin
Further more an embro is not a life form.

How the heck do you come to that conclusion?

The majority do not hate science and bur their heads in anti-science thinking such as life beginning at conception or that an embryo is some how more important then real living people who are dying.

On what basis do you believe that life does not begin at conception?

And "more important than" requires a moral judgement.

Biology is not concerned with defining what it means to be human. That is a matter of theology, or possibly philosophy. I don't see how anyone with the slightest respect for 'science' can be spouting this kind of crap.

"A man's got to know his limitations."
Dirty Harry

[Terra Nullius]

Originally posted by faded glory
This man is officially a god damn idiot. I have met people opposed to stem cells. I can gauruntee you, all of them would change there tune if they were stricken with Multiple Sclerosis or ALS. I know they would

I serouisly hope he gets parkinsons or something ...

Ya think this stuff'll fix Rabies too?

[Underseer]

Terra Nullius, not only do I not place equal value between a blastocyst and a baby, I'm willing to bet you don't either.

How do I know? Well, for starters, those fertility clinics throw blastocysts in the trash every day. They "kill" far more "babies" than the most ardent stem cell researcher ever could, and yet I have not heard one peep of protest from Christians about fertility clinics, but I've heard plenty regarding stem cell research.

If Christians believed that blastocysts have equal "life" value to babies, then they would be howling from the rafters about fertility clinics, and would only speak out against stem cell research from time to time as a way of taking a pause from their non-stop protesting at fertility clinics.

I don't know why Christians are so opposed to stem cell research, but I do know that it is not for the stated reasons. You have absolutely no problem with "babies" being "killed" by the thousands as petri dishes in fertility clinics are cleaned out, heck, you don't even have a problem with millions of living, breathing babies starving to death in Africa, but woe be unto the scientist who wants to stare at a few undifferentiated cells in a petri dish in an effort to understand certain diseases.

Let's play a little hypothetical game, shall we?

Let's say you're in a fertility clinic, and the clinic catches fire. In the clinic with you is a baby, and a refrigerator. The refrigerator contains 200 blastocysts. You can only save one thing: the refrigerator or the baby.

Which would you choose?

[Terra Nullius]

I have not heard one peep of protest from Christians about fertility clinics

Seems to me you haven't been listening very hard. I don't know about Christians en masse, but I think you'll find the Catholic Church is strongly opposed to certain IVF techniques.

I do know that... You have absolutely no problem with "babies" being "killed" in fertility clinics ... you don't even have a problem with millions of living, breathing babies starving to death in Africa

Wow. What exactly do you mean by the verb 'to know.'

Because it doesn't seem to have much in common with any usage I've ever seen before.

Christians are so opposed ...
... You have absolutely no problem
... you don't even have a problem

Are you talking about 'Christians?' Or are you talking about me?

Please make up your mind.

Let's play a little hypothetical game, shall we?

No thanks. It's a loaded question anyway.

If there were 200 babies in the clinic and I couldn't save them all, would that mean I made a moral distinction between them? If one of the babies I left behind was Jewish, would that make me an anti-semite?

But anyway, thanks for the response. I'll see if I can find a reference about official RCC teaching for you.

[Elok]

What an asinine question. The baby, obviously. Assuming the embryos are saved and all miraculously survive despite being unrefrigerated for several hours, the odds of more than one in ten of them actually being implanted are slim, and not all those implanted will survive to be born. As noted earlier in this thread, the vast majority of IVF embryos are doomed to the trash heap the moment they're created. Or, with stem cell research, they can be (basically) organ farms.

I don't know about the history of IVF and the pro-life movement. There could be any number of reasons for silence from the movement, ranging from politics to ignorance. All I can say is that I personally find the procedure gruesome.

[Urban Ranger]

For those who are so concerned with life, please help the poor African nations for crying out loud. You too can help prventing millions of deathes every year.

[Elok]

For those who are so concerned with women's rights, please help the poor African nations that still practice female genital mutilation, for crying out loud. And don't forget arranged marriages, honor killings and polygyny.

EDIT: Whoops, I forgot this was Another Damned Stem Cell Thread, and not Another Damned Abortion Thread. So replace the snarky comments about horrific crimes against women with snarky comments about horrific childhood deaths from preventable illnesses in the third world. The point remains the same, either way: people typically fight perceived injustices where it hits closest to home, regardless of their perspective on certain issues.

[Kuciwalker]

Africa's a ****ing hellhole. Why would any of us want to deal with it?

edit: ah, I see you're responding to an equally inane post by UR. Bah.

[johncmcleod]

I don't understand why the embryo is so important. It is a collection of a few cells. An insect is much larger, more complex, and much more intelligent than embryos, yet does anyone care when an insect dies? And what about farms? Animals far superior to embryos in size, complexity, intelligence, etc. are raised for the sole purpose of being killed and then eaten. At least with embryos we use them before they have consciousness. In fact some of the rhetoric used has been describing it as an 'embryo farm.' Yet does anyone here have problems with animal-farms? The only argument is "Well they are animals and we are humans." But what makes humans superior? Complexity? Intelligence? If we use those factors, embryos and fetuses aren't valuable. And are those even good factors in themselves? Does that mean that stupid people are less valuable than smart people?

And I am confused now. I thought the Religious Right's position on embryos was that they weren't life but they could be, and that is why they need to be protected.

[Proteus_MST]

It seems to me that many people from the religious right believe that from the moment of conception on, the embryo has a soul, making the embryos in the eyes of these people more than just a blob of cells, but instead technically speaking a human, who still lacks organs, a brain and some other things.

[Drake Tungsten]

Animals far superior to embryos in size, complexity, intelligence, etc. are raised for the sole purpose of being killed and then eaten.

I don't understand why people find the lives of infants so important when they're willing to kill and eat farm animals who are superior to infants in terms of size and intelligence. If humanity had any sense at all, we would leave the farm animals alone and use children to make smokestacks, Dismal's Paradox be damned...

[Elok]

If you look at a juvenile form only in terms of its value at that given point in time, you will come to the inescapable conclusion that it is worthless, because at that point in time it pretty much is. It's a work in progress, only it's working on itself. Kind of like a half-completed jigsaw puzzle doesn't look like anything in particular, but still has value relative to an unstarted one insofar as it is on its way. The only difference between an embryo, a fetus, and an infant is the amount of time they've had to develop; while some fail to complete the transition (i.e., miscarriage), it is in the nature of the one to at least attempt to advance into the other stages by turns. Contesting this concept strikes me as ludicrous to the extreme:

"Hey, you just killed an endangered frog!"
"Nuh-uh! It was still a tadpole!"

Alternatively, people will try to argue that a fetus/embryo lacks self-awareness and therefore is not human. However, it is impossible to determine that infants are self-aware either, and I personally doubt it; they don't even have the concept of object permanence when they're first born, but apparently view the world as a plain stream of sensations. If you put a screen in front of the ball your baby is reaching for, the ball will have ceased to exist as far as baby is concerned. Without object permanence, it would be nigh-impossible to have a concept of permanent others, and thus of a self in contrast to others. And, at any rate, as johncmcleod pointed out, determining humanity by intelligence is itself problematic. A raven is, by that measure, more worthy of protection than a baby.

The fact is, we value human beings not for some philosophical postulate such as intelligence or awareness distinguishing us from the beasts, but simply because they are of our species and therefore worthy of protection from us. A baby does not think "cogito ergo sum." It does not apparently think at all. It is a worthless burden, which does nothing but suck, drool, cry and excrete. Oh, and regurgitate, they do that a lot too. Aesthetically, it is quite ugly, all flushed and red and slimy with spit. And it typically reeks of feces, soured milk, and/or cloying baby products.

We value it anyway; by odd coincidence, equally useless creatures called pandas remind us of human infants, so we spend millions of dollars keeping their neurotic, dysfunctional species alive as well, just because they tug at our primitive instincts. The main reason we do not give equal value to a slimy fetus or a little blob of cells called a blastocyst is that we cannot see them or interact with them. But they are genetically identical to the infants they later become.