Bacon and Eggs

Slate’s Michael Kinsley has an excellent piece today about the moral inconsistency in the arguments of the anti-stem cell research people. A point, I might add, that too often goes ignored in the media and in Washington. The point being that if you believe embryos are people then you have no logical alternative but to consider in-vitro fertilization clinics to be the most barbarous form of mass murder in the history of mankind.

In any particular case, fertility clinics try to produce more embryos than they intend to implant. Then—like the Yale admissions office (only more accurately)—they pick and choose among the candidates, looking for qualities that make for a better human being. If you don't get into Yale, you have to attend a different college. If the fertility clinic rejects you, you get flushed away—or maybe frozen until the day you can be discarded without controversy.

And fate isn't much kinder to the embryos that make this first cut. Usually several of them are implanted in the hope that one will survive. Or, to put it another way, in the hope that all but one will not survive. And fertility doctors do their ruthless best to make these hopes come true.

In short, if embryos are human beings with full human rights, fertility clinics are death camps—with a side order of cold-blooded eugenics. No one who truly believes in the humanity of embryos could possibly think otherwise.

I just wanted to put this up on DoG once and for all. It really pisses me off when this point is overlooked, because at the end of the day, it’s truly the only point. The researchers aren’t forcing a couple to have unprotected sex, stashing the woman away in some Matrix-like cocoon, removing her unborn child and picking it apart with fiendish laughter. They’re taking a few of these literally millions of frozen embryos that would be thrown out in any event.

I’ll go another step farther than Mr. Kinsley and attribute a motive to the hypocrites – anti-science bias. That’s it, pure and simple. The religious freakbags will do everything in their power to stop the advancement of science and human understanding. They have it in their heads that knowledge undermines their God. (I suspect it’s because they know that their religion is based on a house of cards that will collapse under the weight of even a tiny amount critical thinking.) So instead of changing their mindsets to think of God as an allegory or perhaps even to perceive humanity and consciousness as God itself, they dig in their heels on the issue of the bible as literal fact, and by God, they are going to prevent any unnecessary (other)book-lernin’.

They may not even realize they are doing it, but their contradiction in being against research but in favor of in-vitro fertilization belies their claim to hold every embryo sacred. Of course, there are a few who are also against in-vitro fertilization. Recall Bush’s emotionally manipulative (and politically motivated) snowflake babies press conference. Again, however, I call hypocrite. If Bush and the rest truly cared about the "snowflake babies," he would insist that any and every unused uterus be impregnated with these embryos every 9 months, spittin’ ‘em out like watermelon seeds at the Texas State Fair – and I’m looking right at the twin uteri of Jenna and Barbara right now, not that either of them could stay sober long enough to carry any babies to term.

But I digress. To sum up - if you are against stem cell research but ambivalent or in favor of in-vitro fertilization than you are either a complete hypocrite or a knowing participant of a genocide. Take your pick, freak.