re: #19 Charles

It’s not necessary to destroy human embryos for this kind of research:

Strictly speaking, it IS necessary to destroy human embryos for this kind of research—it’s just that the embryos to be used will be destroyed anyway.

W’s executive order never banned research with embryonic stem cells—it just banned the use of federal funding of it. Drug companies and private foundations could fund all the embryonic stem cell research they wanted, using their own money. Personally, I’m kind of on the fence about embryonic stem-cell research, but I completely agree that people who object to it on moral grounds should not be forced to support it with their tax dollars. Instead of agitating for renewed federal funding, people who were so high on embryonic stem cell research should’ve just cracked open their checkbooks and donated to privately-funded efforts.

I also wonder what will happen in the unlikely event that we find a successful treatment that uses embryonic stem cells. When we’re actually using them, we won’t be able to simply use embryos that would have been destroyed anyway. We’ll have to manufacture embryos specifically for the purpose of destroying them.

That’s a much tougher moral question than the use of surplus embryos originally created for IVF, and one that few advocates of stem-cell research seem to have thought much about.