Roman Catholic Priests in Missouri Oppose hESC Research
Roman Catholic Priests in Missouri Oppose hESC Research
Roman Catholic priests across the state of Missouri urged parishioners to oppose embryonic stem cell research yesterday. The state-wide push is a result of the recent approval of signature gathering for a ballot initiative which would permit stem cell research. According to an AP story, one priest compared embryonic stem cell research to Nazi experiments. Missouri’s governor supports embryonic stem cell research.
The AP story is widely reported, including in the Kansas City Star, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, and the Seattle Post Intelligencer. Take your pick.
I am appalled whenever someone compares embryonic stem cell research to the Nazis. The Nazis were motivated by hate (and fear). hESC researchers are motivated by a desire to help. People who believe an embryo just past the fertilization stage (of a stage which might reasonably well be expected to be miscarried in nature) is a fully human life will not be convinced by any arguments I might make, so I will not take the time to make them. But please, let’s not bring in the Nazis. Remember them for the cruelties they did, remember them for all the people who died, don’t use them to bolster your rhetoric. That demeans the suffering of the Holocaust.
3 Comments:
The Nazis did not start out with hate. This was the end result. They started with the best technology of the times and the best scientists. They even used our (United States) research on eugenics. This is the slippery slope that people fear may happen again. What started out with three german doctors in a hospital deciding if someone should live or die due to their disabilityended with a german soldier standing on a train platform pointing people either towards the gas chambers or work camps.
Hello Ann.
Interesting blog, no doubt. NOTE: Unlike many of the "wow--and check out my stuff at FreeUndies.com" I am in fact a real live human being. I am carbon based, in any case. More importantly I have nothing to sell here. That's supposed to be funny.
I am by no means an expert in the arena of Stem Cells, be they ACS (Adult derived version) or the much controversial Embryonic Stem Cells(ESC). However I have written from the ethics viewpoint on this issue at http://fray.slate.com/?id=3936&m=4887385&.
A couple of observations. First, on the issue of Nazis, the Church statements thereof, and the other obvious issue, it does seem that the if people are so much as concerned about the impending fate of endangered species and freakish fish that don't even have commercial value at any stage, so too we can show concern for tissue. Mere tissue, that has but potential--Human Embryos included. I for one am not going to stand up and be one of those who think the Nazis are the allegorical equivalent to researchers doing the legwork on this. But we can look at this in some other ways. I raise exotic dart frogs as a hobby. One of those species is critically endangered. The analogy I am going to use is not perfect since humans are not endangered at the moment. But on the one hand I could say that the blue variety which is endangered is "only a frog" in the adult form. The recognized morph with all the legs. Differentiated, etc. Or I could mention also I have tadpoles or even the jellylike eggs. Would an animal protection league say I have more than the parent frogs? In one context I would say yes--there is a hopeful sign that "merely" the eggs are present, if only but fertilized, etc. I count them as frogs for the purposes of caring for them and the other responsibilities. I think by analogy human embryos, even minus any religious input or spiritual concerns, could be considered in such a manner.
That being said, I assume by now you are familiar with the science writer Michael Fumento, who has done some legwork on the issue of another variety; Fumento has not only corresponded with people like myself but written entire pieces (see www.fumento.com) on the lackluster results of ESC research anyhow. (Also see http://www.fumento.com/weblog/archives/stem_cells/index.html for an even faster reference to some more updated research on the differences between the two varieties of stem cells. )In other words this is fast becoming a moot point. ESC researchers, PC mags like Scientific American, and those researchers now revealed to have a vested interest in getting Federal money to flow into their PRIVATE investment ESC companies have much to pitch with ESC. So they lie about ASC and pump up ESC with scant evidence that much progress is being made. This is a money issue, in other words. They then lie about ASC, in saying that no benefit is derived thereof from ASC research. Which is incidentally also a lie since routinely about 80 illnesses and conditions, including heart treatments, are done using ACS research. Yet mags like S.A. ignore all this. The other reasons? ASC researchers don't have the media support that ESC does. Why is that? According to Fumento, the whole reason is hard to place but some journalists are letting the cat out of the bag by making the very connection proponents of ESC always deny. The A-word. Abortion, of course. Naturally. Anna Quindlin goes on to write in one Newsweek article that ESCs may finally alleviate our hang-ups about abortion, since the issue so obviously (admitted, at long last) DOES in point of fact deal with the very act of "termination" of life. It may be unworthy life, like crabgrass. Or worthy, like a dolphin, for a higher "purpose" of some kind. But termination is no doubt involved in ESC research. So again ESC researchers lie about what is actually at stake. Knowing that even if (using Fumento's analogy), compared to ASCs, ESC are a clunker like ENIAC and punchcards. Whereas ASCs are looking more and more everyday like 64-bit supercomputers doing millions of calcs per second. Instinctively, the major media trump the junk, knowing there are cultural imperatives that require abortion's nastier side to be desensitized in our collective minds.
--Wakefield Tolbert
Columbia SC
To those of you who make a hate Nazis crime of stem cell research I have only one thing to say: As a devoted Catholic it is easy to rise above this religious comment by this priest when you have a loved one suffering everyday by a ALS and you have read over and over how stem cell therapy may some day bring a cure to Cancer, AlS, Diabetes and many other disease. I cannot tell you how it feels to be so helpless to watch someone you love suffer every day. Please stop this crazy thinking and open your hearts to those who truly need this research.
Post a Comment
<< Home