Our new president and the left wing media (just about the whole show in this country, with a few notable exceptions) is rejoicing in the new-found freedom to harvest stem cells from human embryos--destroying them in the process. Of course, this is a horrendous thing--the destruction of innocent human life for the purported purpose of helping others. Even a child can understand that the destruction of one human being for the benefit of another is always a crime against humanity as a whole.
But that isn't the beginning or the end of the ethical crisis we are facing here. Even those embryos that will not be destroyed in stem cell research (at least for now) are morally problematic.
The fact that there are millions--perhaps hundreds of millions--of human embryos frozen in various scientific and medical facilities world wide points to a much deeper crime, one that most of us are loathe to admit. Human beings are being produced to satisfy the wants of others. For the most part they have been produced so that couples who would be otherwise childless may have children.
Whats wrong with that, you ask? The very same thing that is wrong with any act that turns a human being into a product--whether slavery, or child pornography, or any other form of involuntary servitude to the will of another.
Those embryos exist in a state of suspended animation, their lives on hold until someone else decides what to do with them--whether to destroy them or bring them to term. The latter choice, of course, is better than the former. But the mere fact that they were conceived not for their own value as persons created in the image and likeness of God, but for the desires (often presented as emotional "needs") of others is wrong--profoundly wrong. People are not commodities. Never, ever. And this is the heart of the problem we are facing when we discuss embryonic research.
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Do you also think that this core problem is the heart of the real controversy over "Octomom"?
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