To follow up on yesterday’s post on stem-cell research, Slate’s William Saletan has written a fascinating item on conservative efforts to protect “pre-life.” As Saletan explained, the political fight has been moving backward, slowly but surely, through the stages of development, to the point now that the right is worried about embryos even when they’re not embryos.
Conservatives on the bioethics council are opposing biomedical research that might destroy “embryo-like” entities. They’re pitting the lives of patients against something not quite human and not quite alive, for reasons they can’t quite explain.
In a new report, the council considers four ideas for getting stem cells without killing embryos. The boldest, Altered Nuclear Transfer, would create “biological artifacts” that couldn’t become human embryos but could make human embryonic stem cells. Should we pursue this directly? No, says the council, because it “raises many serious ethical concerns.”
What are those concerns? The council isn’t sure. Pro-lifers used to say embryos were sacred because they were embryos, not blobs. But now some blobs sound too much like embryos. The council warns against the creation and exploitation of “human beginnings,” “near-human artifacts,” or “intermediate biological forms.” Why should forms, beginnings, or artifacts take priority over patients? The council doesn’t say.
I can appreciate a certain ideological consistency to the far-right perspective, even though I strongly disagree with it. They believe life begins at conception and that blastocysts are, for all intents and purposes, people.
But in this case, conservatives are fighting to protect “biological artifacts” that can produce stem cells for research, but are not, in fact, embryos. Not good enough, the right says, because the research might “look like” interference with the development of an embryo.
We’re getting closer and closer to “every sperm is sacred” territory all the time.