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Obama's 'Discarded' Embryos
Posted by Tom McFeely
Wednesday, March 25, 2009 1:38 PM
President Obama at yesterday's news conference. (CNS/Reuters)
Yesterday, President Barack Obama justified his recent authorization of funding for human life-destroying embryonic stem-cell research with the following argument:
“Look, I believe that it is very important for us to have strong moral guidelines, ethical guidelines when it comes to stem-cell research or anything that touches on, you know, the issues of possible cloning or issues related to, you know, the human life sciences,” the president said at a White House press conference.
“I think that the guidelines that we provided meet that ethical test,” he added. “What we have said is that for embryos that are typically about to be discarded, for us to be able to use those in order to find cures for Parkinson’s or for Alzheimer’s or, you know, all sorts of other debilitating diseases — juvenile diabetes — that it is the right thing to do.”
The Daily Blog thinks some reasoning by analogy will prove helpful in assessing the merits of Obama’s argument that it’s morally acceptable to kill a group of human beings — early-stage embryos — for research because they are “about to be discarded.”
Let’s assume that an appallingly evil regime had created a network of death camps and assigned a whole class of innocent human beings to those death camps simply because this evil regime denied the humanity of that class of innocent persons.
For the sake of discussion, we’ll call this evil regime “Nazi Germany,” and we’ll posit that the class of innocent people whose humanity was denied and who were sent to the regime’s death camps were the Jewish people who lived in Germany and other Nazi-occupied countries.
Let’s further posit that this evil regime of Nazi Germany was able to find some conscienceless medical researchers who were willing — indeed even eager — to carry out horrible, life-destroying medical experiments on some of these innocent, imprisoned Jewish people because of the unique scientific insights that allegedly could be obtained only through such research.
And let’s posit these hideous experiments were justified by the political leaders who authorized them and the researchers who conducted them because, it was argued, the lives of the persons being subjected to the experiments were certain to be “discarded” anyway in the genocidal Holocaust underway against the Jewish people.
Now, we don’t believe President Obama ever would argue it was ethical to carry out even a single life-destroying medical experiment on one of the innocent victims of the Nazi Holocaust.
So why, Mr. President, do you think it’s ethical to do the same thing to the innocent human embryos that you say are going to be “discarded”?
| Filed under barack obama, embryonic research
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