American Gadfly

Commentary, Critique, and Insight on Contemporary America

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

The hypocrisy of Bush's stance on human embryonic stem cell research.

GW Bush and his Christian conservative base are of the opinion that human life begins at conception, hence a human embryo is considered a human life. Thus, in order to defend these "human" lives, Bush has taken a stance against any research that might lead to the destruction of these embryos.
If GW Bush and his Christian conservative base want to be morally consistent with their position, however, they should stand against the procedure of in vitro fertilization. GW Bush has remained completely silent on the topic of a procedure that is producing thousands and thousands of excess human embryos every year. These thousands of human embryos are left in a state of suspended animation - frozen in liquid nitrogen, and for the most part, unlikely to ever be allowed to develop into a human being. Some of these embryos might lose their viability over time, or through events such as power failures or incubator malfunctions, may die. There are currently an estimated 400,000 such frozen human embryos in the United States, trapped in what could be termed a physical purgatory.
And yet, GW Bush and the Christian conservatives don't seem to care about this. A few of them are taking the crazy mission to try to adopt these embryos to bring about a fully developed human life - the Snowflakes foundation is one such group, exploited by Bush in a recent East Room photo op. Good luck finding nearly half a million women willing to provide their wombs for such a cause.
I wonder how Bush and the Christian conservative base would do if we developed a technology to generate a viable human embryo from any human cell - so-called therapeutic or reproductive cloning. Would we be forced to care for every hair, skin cell, or other part of our body, at the risk of destroying a potential "human life"?! Or would they simply denounce such technology as an abomination? The parallels between cloning and in vitro fertilization are that excess human embryos would be generated in both techniques, yet one technique would be abhorred while the other is accepted by the Christian conservatives.
The misguided views of GW Bush and the Chrisitian conservatives has one key source - the Christian Bible. We need to realize one fundamental issue - the Bible is not a science text. To attempt to derive any scientific truth from the Bible is lunacy. If we would view the Bible as scientifically accurate, we would still view the world as flat!!!! Again, refer to the Skeptic's Annotated Bible for numerous references to a flat world in the Bible, and other scientific falsehoods.

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