It quotes approvingly that impeccable pro-lifer and careful moral philosopher Orrin Hatch, who assures us that destroying small humans for the benefit of large humans is the “ultimate pro-life decision.”
The Times frets that President Bush is “wooing Roman Catholic Democrats.” The Times usually urges Bush to woo Democrats. But now it demands that he reject “cynical politicking and embrace medical common sense.”
Reducing human embryos to the status of lab rats is medical common sense to the Times. After all, it argues, those human embryos are just headed toward the Thursday trash anyways: “Is it more ethical to allow excess human embryos created during fertility treatment to be used for medical research or to have them destroyed and discarded?”
Here's an answer: neither. The Times' question is, of course, sophistical, since the first option requires destruction too. But that's okay with the Times, because stell cells from dismembered embryos are “capable of developing into any sort of specialized body part.”
The Times insists that it is not on the slippery slope, but then proceeds to do a backflip off it. It learned nothing from Wednesday's news that private researchers are busy creating embryos for the sole purpose of harvesting their cells.
Far from giving it pause, this news actually convinces the Times that the federal government should move with haste to manage the embryo dismembement itself. “By approving the Clinton administration's guidelines, whose implementation Bush delayed after taking office, Bush can bring most embryo research under federal ethics and public disclosure rules. He can also ensure that government participates in the serious ethical debate that ought to occur concerning any radical new biotechnology.”
How's that for sterling logic?
By bringing the federal government into medicine's house of horrors, all Bush would ensure is its expansion. The Times gasps that “by reflexively opposing all federal funding of the field, Bush would only drive private researchers like the Virginia infertility specialists into secrecy” – as if embryo experimentation magically becomes moral under the auspices of the federal government.
The Virginia fertility researchers simply realize where America's culture of freak and amoral science is going. They are taking the moral relativists at the Times and elsewhere at their word: that human embryos aren't human lives worthy of respect but raw material for medicine; and that the great need to “cure diseases” confers upon researchers an unlimited right to destroy embryos for society's advantage.
If Bush signs off on federal funding for research on the cells of destroyed embryos, those Virginia researchers will soon be government employees.
