Categories: just-life
Date: 20 July 2006 15:32:03
What is life and how sacred is it?? Highly emotive questions when it comes to Stem Cell research. For those who might not have been listening to the news (due to the saturation of Lebanon) recently might not have heard that Mr Bush has exercised his veto power for the first time since coming to office to prevent additional funds into government funded research.
Ignoring the fact that three-quarters of the American population were in favour of the law, or that it got through the house 63-37 (a couple of votes short of a veto proof margin) what we come to is what conducting research to help save people's lives is worth.
Now, I know the argument is that life, no matter at what stage of development, is sacred. Mr Bush made this very clear at his announcment where he was surrounded by children who, and I quote; Each of these children was adopted while still an embryo and has been blessed with a chance to grow, to grow up in a loving family. These boys and girls are not spare parts. This is all very sweet and aww bless, but not all embryos that are produced during the IVF are viable for implantation. The ones that are viable, that are healthy, robust, mulicellular are stored, implanted. But the ones that haven't developed, that are still only at the one-two cell stage are not of implant quality. Ones that wouldn't be carried if they were implanted. Even in Mr Bush's perfect world, these embryos are still being destroyed.
These embryos are still good enough for scientific reseach. We can still use these to help others. Or rather, we could have used these.
Over the years there have been many cases of question marks over the morality of medical practises. Blood transfusions, organ transplant, IVF, non-human muscle transplants, all of these have had issuse over their use. All of these are now in use.