stem cell research

[gambit]

Well, I've been steering clear of this topic until I felt I could add something new or relevant to the discussion, and from the looks of it, I would be reiterating arguments that have been said already.

So instead, I'm going to throw a couple of points into the ring and let everyone make of it as they will. These aren't opinions, just new points of discussion.

1) With the talk about stem cells not having a choice in the matter for research, I'm reminded of the people the Nazis experimented on in the concentration camps. They did not have a choice in the matter, yet physicians today still wrestle with using the data gathered from the Nazi experimentations. From Wikipedia:

The modern body of medical knowledge about how the human body reacts to freezing to the point of death is based almost exclusively on these Nazi experiments. This, together with the recent use of data from Nazi research into the effects of phosgene gas, has proved controversial and presents an ethical dilemma for modern physicians who do not agree with the methods used to obtain these data.

Thoughts?


2) This is a passage from the book The President of Good & Evil by noted philosopher, Peter Singer. In his book he mostly argues President Bush and his policies from a philosophical stand point, and one of the issues he touches is stem cell research. This paragraph is a factual one, not an argument one way or the other, about miscarriages--mostly ones that women never know about. I follow it with a question he poses for discussion.

Every year in the United States, millions of embryos die. Each of them had the unique genetic potential of an individual human being. These embryos do not die in laboratories, nor in abortion clinics, nor after women have taken RU486, the "abortion pill." They die as part of a natural process that has, as far as we know, been going on as long as there have been human beings. Some scientists estimate that for every embryo that becomes a child, four fertilized eggs fail to make it. Others think that the ratio is closer to one lost fertilized egg for every child born. Even on the lower estimate, more than three million embryos die annually in the United States from natural causes. These are embryos that have failed to implant in the woman's uterus. They are released with her menstrual bleeding. In most cases the woman never even knows that she conceived.

Should we feel that this loss of embryos is a terrible thing, a kind of ongoing holocaust? If each human embryo is "something precious to be protected," then surely this is how we should feel.

Thoughts?