Krauthammer on hESC

Charles Krauthammer, not a religious man by his own admission, but at least a thoughtful conservative wrote an article in the Washington Post today explaining why he declined Pres. Obama’s invitation to attend the signing ceremony overturning Pres. Bush’s limitations on federal funding for hESC. The article is not just thoughtful, it drives a truck through the phony rhetorics of Mr. Obama’s lecturing on science and ethics. Not only is it disingenuous to claim that until the Divine Revelation of Obama to the world, American scientific policy was shaped by politics and religious dogma. It is also logically inconsistent to claim that in forbidding human cloning one is not putting ethics—i.e. moral dogma, one might say, religion—over pure science.

But Mr Krauthammer’s column makes another thing clear when he says:

I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred upon conception. But I also do not believe that a human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserves no more respect than an appendix.

This thing is: without religion you have no moral anchor. While I agree with most of Mr Krauthammer’s practical decisions, he becomes completely inconsistent when he concludes, on the basis of the principles in the quote above, that it is morally justified to use “left-over embryos” from IVF treatments. Exactly equivalent to what a human embryo is, Mr Krauthammer is unable to explain and he adds nothing more enlightening to these comments. I suggest that he is wrong in his basic principle and that personhood is conferred upon conception. This is a conclusion not so much based on religious revelation even; rather, it is the safe logical conclusion drawn from the reliable observation that the vast majority of embryos, once implanted in a woman’s uterus, actually develop into persons. So even if one avoids the dilemma at the crossroads of science and faith—the question when personhood is conferred—it seems safer, and in line with actual reality, to simply declare as a matter of categorization that embryos are persons.

It is not up to the pro-life person to prove this statement true beyond reasonable doubt, but rather it is the responsibility of those demanding certain rights that these claims have a basis in reality and do not conflict with the rights of others. It is the scientists who would have to prove that their experiments are safe, not the public at large to prove the scientists’ experiments dangerous.

Slick Willy Doesn’t Know What an Embryo Is

POTUS 42 as always had problems with basic school subjects. While in office, he had trouble with the English language such as when he could not define the word “is.” But biology also has not been his strong suit, as evidenced again this week by his moronic statement in an interview with CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta as they talked about stem cells. Clearly, Clinton has not a clue what an “embryo” is, when he says that Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research (hESC) is fine as long as we’re not talking about “a process that would allow them to be fertilized and become …ehm, little babies.”

The statement is emblematic of the public debate about hESC and illustrates why Pres. Obama’s decision to throw federal money at this research is so evil. On July 18, 2006, CNN’s correspondent Carol Costello made this blooper on live TV when she was talking to CNN’s medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen about this same topic:

Cohen: “These are four-day old embryos. We’re talking about very tiny, tiny embryos.”
Costello: “And they’re not fertilized either, right?”
Cohen: “Well no, an embryo is fertilized.”
Costello: “Just to make it clear–”
Cohen: “Its sperm and egg have met each other–”
Costello: “So, it is?”
Cohen: “–and they, they’ve grown for about four days. So, they’ve formed a very, very small embryo.”
Costello: “Ok, so I feel silly now.”

The American media, all having been educated in the Liberal School of Journalism, and Democratic politicians, who are too busy grabbing power, clearly all flunked biology. But these same morons are driving the debate about hESC.

Human Embryonic Stem Cell research is murder, plain and simple. You have to terminate the life of a fertilized human egg which thereby has become an embryo, which is a synonym for “baby.” So, yes, hESC is the killing of a human baby. That is why we pro-lifers oppose hESC. That has nothing to do with being unable to separate faith and science. I have no religious ‘beliefs’ about the fact that hESC kills babies. This is not preached in my church nor do I read it anywhere. I know this because I paid attention in biology class and know what an embryo is. Anyone who supports hESC does not know what an embryo is. That Bill Clinton does not know this either is shocking. Newsbusters’ Matthew Balan sighs, understandably, that Sanjay Gupta has ties to Clinton so we should not be surprised that he did not feel it necessary to correct Number 42 on his biology.