Wesley J. Smith has a post concerning the possibility that embryonic stem cells may be obtainable from embryos that are already dead. This would mean that the act of harvesting the stem cells would not need to be the act that killed the embryos--they might have been killed or died in some other way.
Rather surprisingly, Smith thinks this is possibly a breakthrough for "ethical" embryonic stem cell research. I disagree. We would be foolish if we did not realize right at the outset that funding for such research would directly encourage the killing of the embryos so that their stem cells could be harvested.
Let's remember, as I say in the comments thread on Smith's post, that embryos don't die in car accidents. It's not as though scientists are just going to "come upon" a bunch of dead embryos somewhere who died in some entirely innocent, tragic, and accidental fashion and then take stem cells from them after the fact. Of course they would kill them for research purposes. Embryos out of the uterus are creatures of the laboratory. They are made in the laboratory, and it is in the laboratory that they are either frozen, temporarily sustained in vitro until they die because they are unimplanted, or sent to the fertility doctor's office for attempted implantation. The embryos which ESCR advocates want to use are considered in vitro fertilization "extras"--that is, when they are thawed, no one is intending to implant them. It would be the easiest thing in the world, if stem-cell harvesting from dead embryos turned out to work and were federally funded, to thaw them, let them die unimplanted, and then harvest their stem cells.
There would be no practical way whatsoever to limit funding for such research to cells harvested only from embryos who had accidentally died when the intent was to implant them. There would be no practical way to prevent embryos' being killed for research purposes.
Another thing to remember: We pro-lifers used to oppose the use of aborted fetal tissue for research. Even though the murdered child is "already dead," we well know--at least years ago we knew--that funding research using his body is de facto encouraging and rewarding his murder, that it is grisly, horrible, and entirely unethical. Research using tissue from killed embryos is on exactly the same level, from a pro-life perspective.
Let's keep our eye on the realities and not be naive. It's true that stem-cell harvesting from dead embryos isn't what our opponents have heretofore had in mind. But it doesn't follow that it's a good idea. In fact, I'd like to think that if the "other guys" had been proposing this from the outset, pro-lifers would have opposed it. As it is, the "other guys" (ESCR advocates) are apparently squelching news about it because they are fixated on overturning the Bush funding policy altogether. But even if embryonic stem cell research using cells taken from dead embryos passes the test of the present Bush funding policy, it should be eschewed, not celebrated and funded.
The very idea of embryo research makes me so angry that I could chew glass. It's like the news programs calling the baby that was cut from her mother's womb recently a 'fetus'.
Well said Lydia. I wholeheartedly concur. Thank you for this crucial commentary.
Yeah, they take the stem cells from dead embryos the same way the Chinese take the organs from dead political prisoners.
Thanks for the supportive comments.
Christina, that's a good and important analogy: The analogy to organ donation was explicitly made regarding this new technique. But we're talking about something analogous to taking organs from executed political prisoners or from murder victims--in other words, from unconsenting subjects who were killed (at least in part) so that they could be harvested. The article to which Smith links makes it very clear that this is what happened: The researchers took "extras" from IVF, left them to sit until they stopped dividing and were regarded therefore (perhaps correctly) as dead, and then quickly got living cells from them before the individual cells were all dead.
Well, of course any unimplanted embryo will eventually die. They won't stay alive indefinitely and keep dividing and developing all the way in a petri dish. If these embryos had been wanted, an attempt would have been made to care for them by implanting them. But they were donated for research and observed until they died in the name of research. This is not what is (supposed to be) done in the case of people who donate organs!