A MAN WITH A MEMORY LOOKS AT FROZEN EMBRYOS | 2001-07-28
The embryos that researchers want to use for stem cell research are frozen fetuses. They were stored by desperate couples who wanted to be sure that they could bring them to term if they could not have natural children.
Some of these couples were later able to carry their own children to term due to medical treatments. These couples have no use for the embryos they stored, so scientists want to use them for research that could make the crippled walk and cure other invalids.
The extreme branch of the pro-life movement wants the embryos simply destroyed.
Last week, a group of witnesses came to Congress to argue for this extreme pro-life position. They were couples who could not have children themselves, so they had ADOPTED some of those frozen embryos and brought them to term. They had the babies in their arms before the committee to show that, if the fetuses were brought to term, they became real babies.
Everybody already knew that, of course, but they showed their babies to counter the potent argument in favor of stem cell research.
Crippled, dying and desperate people who want embryonic stem cell research to save them go in front of the committee. They argue in person that they are more important than some abstract rights of frozen embryos.
To counter this, the only thing those against embryonic stem cell research could do was bring in these babies developed from frozen embryos.
But I remember when the same kind of people who now oppose stem cell research WERE TRYING TO GET THE FREEZING OF EMBRYOS OUTLAWED. They said that, since some of the embryos would have to be destroyed, they shouldn't be created in the first place.
So if their side had won back then, THE PEOPLE SITTING IN FRONT OF THE COMMITTEE WITH HEALTHY BABIES TO ARGUE THEIR SIDE WOULD NOT HAVE THOSE BABIES!!!
But now, as always, those who have a religious knee-jerk against medical advances are claiming, in effect, that they were always for the right of people to freeze embryos in case they could not have natural children. As always, they ignore the position they originally took.
They did the same thing after they opposed dissection, smallpox vaccination, blood transfusions, and practically every other advance in medical history.