I just got out of a Medical Grand Rounds Lecture. The topic - Embryonic Stem Cell Research. Based on the questions afterwards, you got the impression that half the people thought that it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. The other half were totally disgusted. The thrust of the talk was that none of us really know what the nature of the embryo is, therefore we ought to go ahead use embryonic stem cells for research.
Excuse me?
So, to borrow an illustration from Mike Adams, if I were out hunting and I saw a bush shaking off in the distance, and I'm not sure if it's a deer or another hunter, I should just go ahead and shoot.
Other points of the talk:
Scientists are capable of making nuanced philosophical distinctions between universal moral laws and subjective religous sentiment.
Religous conservatives are idiots who oppose everything good for mankind.
If you oppose embryonic stem-cell research, you must be a religous conservative.
Religion is irrelevant to ethics.
They are using embryonic stem cells in Europe, and we should do whatever they do, because Europe has been nothing short of a city on a hill for thousands of years.
When the speaker was done, the moderator got up and said something like, "Let's be honest, this is just a bunch of rationalization for doing something that everyone here is uncomfortable with." Couldn't have said it better myself.
Don't lose this point in the gripping social debate: We're not actually fighting about whether anyone should do embryonic stem cell research. People (even in the U.S.) are doing it.
ReplyDeleteWe're fighting about whether we should use mountains of federal taxpayer money to fund it.
True that. But the amount of research is proportionaly to how much money they can squeeze out of the federal government. What's going on now is barely a trickle compared to the deluge of destruction that would come with federal funding.
ReplyDeleteAnother issue that came up several times was that, since we have a bunch of frozen embryos leftover from IVF, we ought to just use them for research rather than destroy them.
Creepy.