HUMAN CLONING AND STEM CELL RESEARCH -- ARE THE ANSWERS REALLY THAT SIMPLE? | 2002-01-05
The twenty-first century will be the time when a total revolution in human biology takes place. Babies being born today can probably live as long as they want to live. By the end of the century a person can be as smart and as good-looking as he or she wants to be.
Right now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, this biological revolution is about where the medical revolution was around 1800. In 1800, practically every preacher wanted human dissection to stay banned. For a faith that preached the resurrection of the body and the body as the temple of the soul, such a ban was obvious.
By 1900, practically every preacher claimed that his church had never wanted to ban dissections.
Today conservatives bang their chests and brag that they are rough and tough on stem cell research. They tell me I am a wimp on the issue.
But when I get these letters, I ask a simple question and I never get an answer. I send them a copy of Whitaker Online for May 12, 2001 -- FRANCE - THE BOY IN THE BUBBLE. France had a law banning the use of fetal tissues, but when a real child's life could only be saved by using them, France dropped that law like a hot rock. This sounds a lot like the churches who dropped their opposition to human dissection by 1900, doesn't it?
So I ask each of these chest-beating people whether they would have told the parents that fetal tissues could not used and their child would just have to die. I have not gotten one single answer yet. I won't use the term, but O'Reilly says that people who won't face his questions are cowards. Let's just say that all that moral bravery seems to decrease when a question like this comes up.