A question of the sanctity of life
oscillon has an interesting question. We are discussing the morality of embryonic stem cell research:
I will make this as clear as I can.
Harvesting human babies, even small ones, for medical research cheapens human life. Allowing anyone to make a profit, or find it in their self-interest, in an act which cheapens human life is imprudent.
It is a question of incentives. Abortion mills, Planned Parenthood and so on, are not charity organizations. They make a profit from their acts. They buy houses and send their kids to college and so on. It is in their best interest to continue the practice of infanticide, and to expand the practice. The Abortionists have become a faction and a politic power in their own right, and influenced the laws and customs of this nation.
So, here. This stem cell research is worthless, scientifically speaking, or at least not as promising as non-destructive stem cell research. Allowing embryo stem cell research will create a faction with a monetary self-interest in continuing the practice, and expanding it.
This is true even if the primary practice of in-vitro fertilization cannot be stopped.
I will grant you the question but not the conclusion. If I lived in a society that produced mass graves of innocent corpses, I would, as a civilized man, as a Christian, demand the bodies be decently buried and decently treated with respect. The argument would be the same as I use here: namely, that it is imprudent to create an incentive aimed at further dehumanization of the human race. Treating corpses as a raw material is the same as permitting cannibalism on the ground that it is unthrifty to let good meat go to waste. Once we start plowing the dead into the ground as fertilizer, once we stop treating the dead with respect, once we treat human beings as raw materials, it creates a faction with a powerful incentive ever further to erode the bulwark of laws and customs surrounding human dignity. Once that bulwark is down, the weak are livestock for the strong.
Since I am also arguing, elsewhere in this thread, against someone who wants to perform nazi-style experiments on those convicted of capital crimes, I need not look far to find an example. Once you admit the axiom that human life is not sacred, no human life is safe. First it is embryos, then it is late-term babies, then it is Chinese babies that the mother wants to keep, then it is Terri Schaivo, then it is other patients who are awake enough to ask for food as they starve to death, then it is convicts convicted of capital crimes, then it is unlawful combatants, then it is lawful combatants, then it is felons, pederasts, inmates of insane asylums, anyone else who falls under the disdain of Caesar.
It is merely amazing to me that you cannot see this argument. What has all human progress been about, if not extended the boundaries of human dignity to the weak, the poor, the oppressed? What is civilization, aside from the conviction that human life is sacred, and the logical deductions following form that conviction?
If human life is not sacred, why are any laws sacred? If the laws are not sacred, why obey them?
Don’t you grasp what is at stake? WE ARE APOCALYPTO!! Our society RIGHT NOW is as violent and grotesque as what you saw in that bloodthirsty historical-make-believe movie. The way we treat the unborn is just as inhuman and inhumane as the way the South American Indians treated their captives and slaves: human life was livestock to be butchered for their idols.
Now, you will understand my position on an emotional level if you imagine that mass grave in the movie Apocalypto filled with my children, as my children looked five minutes or five days before they were born. Fully human beings, little innocent life, completely helpless, and relying on no one but their mother to remain alive. Now imagine all those wee children rotting in the ground.
The mass graves of the babies in ancient Sparta was called the Apothetae. Unwanted children were merely dropped into the chasm.
In modern times, a mass grave of 54 dead babies, their limbs dismembered from their bodies, was found by two boys playing near a roadside in Southern California. The town was so shocked, that they arranged to have the tiny corpses decently buried.
As it turns out, these babies were the product of an abortion clinic, and the trucker who was shipping them as medical waste to some other place where they could be disposed of, got lazy and decided merely to dump his load in a roadside ditch. That was where the boys found them.
Of course, the corpse of a dead pre-born baby looks just like the corpse of a dead post-born baby. Whatever the mysterious aetherial property it is that Leftists think unborn babies lack which makes them somehow not babies is not a property that can be seen with the eye, detected with an intrument.
In the ghastly sequel to this story, the ACLU sued the town to prevent the burials. Volunteers from the town had paid the expenses for the graves and stones, and Christened the babies with names, so that there would be a name for the headstones. The ACLU correctly understood the spiritual warfare involved: these children could not be treated with the dignity of human beings, lest the practice of aborticide be revealed for what it was. So even thought there was no one with any financial interest or legal standing to sue to prevent the town from burying the tiny corpses, the ACLU took the case pro bono.
You understand now? The point of the lawsuit was to dehumanize the little victims of abortion.
Destructive embryonic stem cell reseaech helps dehumanize the little victims of abortion. That is the point, not scientific research. Whether this is primary or secondary, it must be opposed.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
