Take a Side with Embryonic Stem Cells
By Kevin Roeten (11/29/08)
With four types of stem cells, use of three are ethical because no “life’ is jeopardized. In Embryonic Stem Cells (ESCs), a fertilized cell must be destroyed to obtain parts that are thought to cure particular illnesses. One who doesn’t understand “life” in the Declaration considers ESCR ethical.
One likely assumes several things with ESCs: 1) there is no life present, and therefore no “soul”; 2) ESCs hold great promise to cure many diseases; 3) most ESCs come from in vitro fertilization (IVF) usually slated to be killed anyway; and, 4) ESCs show great promise with diseases like MS.
Actually, NO one can say they know for a fact that a soul is present. A soul cannot be seen, but 86% of Americans say they believe in God, and most of those know that a soul exists in our “life”. But exactly when is it there?
Theories abound, but one would think that God would make it known when that soul exists. God did say that He knew us in the womb (Psalm 139). Through science, we know that a fertilized embryo contains 46 chromosomes and all the genes necessary for human development.
Ward Kischer (human embryologist) says, “Virtually every human embryologist and every major textbook of human embryology states that fertilization marks the beginning of the life of the new individual human being.” The Didache, the Catholic Church’s oldest teaching manual (90 A.D.), condemned both abortion and infanticide. The US government’s Domestic Policy Council (1/10/07) condemned the destruction of human embryos for the purpose of ESCR and writes, “Embryos are humans in their earliest possible stage.”
Unfortunately, harvesting for ESCs involves destroying a fertilized embryo. Adult Stem Cells (ASCs) have over 30 anti-cancer uses, along with seventy-three known success stories in treating diseases, but do not destroy life.
ESCs show a disturbing tendency to generate tumors when placed in animals. The going argument is ESCs normally use fertilized embryos that are slated to be destroyed anyway. According to the 2002 RAND Corporation study 400,000 frozen embryos were stored in fertility clinics. Advocates of ESCR claim that if those fertilized cells are not used for research, they will be discarded. However, that same RAND survey found 88.2% of the embryos are reserved for future attempts at pregnancy, 2.2% are discarded, and 2.8% are used for research.
Discarding frozen embryos can be analogous to a group of children permanently trapped in a schoolhouse through no fault of their own. It would not be morally acceptable to send in a remote control device that would harvest organs from those children and cause their demise. It’s never permissible to do research on, and kill a terminally ill child in the process.
A recent conference call with the MS society proved how desperate many are to find a cure for MS. They don’t understand that scientists are moving away from ESCR and towards ASCR, which is the only kind of cure to help human patients. They still cling to doctors who believe all those fertilized embryos will be discarded anyway, so it’s justified to harvest their cell parts.
They refuse to understand that scientists are now able to “reprogram” normal cells with “iPS” (induced pluripotent stem) cells to become a different type of tissue. Online NATURE (8/27/08), described the direct manipulation in the bodies of living mice: of changing common pancreatic cells into insulin-producing cells.
Nobody knows for an absolute fact that killing an ESC is killing a real person. But a fertilized stem cell has every chromosome it needs to grow into a human adult, and is distinctly different from its mom and dad. That’s likely the best time to have a soul installed. Even for the “soul” skeptic, one would have to think that believing “life” exists at conception is the only option---especially when the payback is so immense.
Of course, we could always use a person’s parts to repair someone else. But didn’t they hang people after the Nuremburg trials because of the Nazi attempt to do just that? Many with MS became very emotional about Bush’s elimination of federal funding for ESCR. It sounds as if Obama will reinstate the funding, even though pure logic points the other way.
Kevin Roeten
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