Reason 1,309 Why the "Culture of Life" Movement Promotes Neither

I just sat through a very difficult story to watch on 60 Minutes, regarding stem cell research and the fate of excess embryos that are produced at fertility clinics. The facts were nothing new, as I cover many of them on my Social Issues section of this site, but it doesn’t make the facts any less disturbing.

I say the story was difficult to watch because many stories that uncover or show the reasoning or corruption behind Bush administration policies, are in fact very challenging to sit through due to the sheer lack of common sense of Bush’s guiding principles, but this one in particular was a little harder to stomach than most.

The piece in particular focused on a couple that used in vitro fertilization to get pregnant with both of their boys, and it’s a story repeated across the country by many couples who are unable to have children without assistance from a fertility clinic.

Here’s how it works:

John and Jane can’t get pregnant through conventional attempts. They visit a fertility clinic where Jane, using the miracle of Pfizer, produces and abundance of eggs, which subsequently extracted, and fertilized with John’s sperm. The embryos are then frozen in liquid nitrogen, where one at a time they are implanted into Jane’s uterus, which may or may not reject the egg.

If Jane doesn’t get pregnant, they move onto the next egg waiting in the little –321F tank. If she does get pregnant, Jane and John now have anywhere from 1 to 25 or so little embryos, waiting in storage.

Unlike our current Federal budget, these unused embryos are in a state of surplus. Across the country there are 400,000 or so frozen embryos in fertility clinics, with nowhere to go.

When the embryos are donated to science for stem cell research, they have the ability to take the fertilized eggs and grow them into almost any cell in the human body you can imagine – brain cells, building blocks of the spinal chord, kidney cells, blood cells, you name it.

Why not donate them to other couples for adoption, you might ask? That happens all the time. And of the 400,000 embryos waiting for some kind of action, about 100 were adopted last year by wealthy couples who could afford it. I’ve never been too quick with math, but I’ve calculated this a few different ways and consulted friends – and according to what I’ve come up with, that’s still 399,900 embryos that are sitting in tanks across the country, doing absolutely nothing.

And here’s the kicker – sooner or later, these embryos will die or be thrown in the trash like the overcooked egg you made for breakfast this morning.

Later in the piece, Leslie Stahl was brought to a lab where she and the 60 Minutes viewer observed stem cells growing together as heart cells in a petri dish – they were actually only a small amount clumped together, and they were beating in rhythm, exactly as a heart does. It was a truly amazing site.

To give “the other side” of the argument, 60 Minutes brought on a conservative Princeton University professor who works for the Bush administration, who, to the amazement of the viewing audience, tried to equate the human dignity of embryos in a petri dish, which would get thrown away regardless, with a human being sitting in a wheelchair.

So to recap, see if you can tell me which side of this argument represents the “culture of life.” First, bio-ethicist Art Caplan, from the 60 Minutes story:

"To me it means that the president’s policy is hypocritical and deceptive," says Caplan. "It is not a secret that embryos are destroyed at infertility clinics." Caplan refers to couples who have decided they are finished having children or trying to conceive through in vitro fertilization who tell their clinics to destroy their unused embryos. Caplan and other medical professionals believe the “stem cells” from such embryos – groups of nascent cells that can grow into organs and body parts – will soon provide the means of curing diseases or revitalizing injured body parts like spines.

“So we have a policy that says, ‘Can’t destroy them for research, I, as president, can’t abide by it,’” says Caplan. “[But] every day a clinic somewhere destroys one.” Caplan says keeping thousands of surplus embryos frozen is not much different than
destroying them outright.

And now, the representative from the Bush administration, Robert George:

Embryonic stem cell research destroys the embryo, an entity that must be treated with dignity, says George. “[Embryos] should be treated respectfully, the way we treat the remains of human beings at later stages of life,” says George. “Those bunches of cells are very unique bunches of cells. Those are human beings in the earliest stages of their natural development,” he tells Stahl. “You were one once, I was one once.” He believes embryos should be buried or cremated or even kept frozen rather than destroyed.

Funerals for embryos. Who says the Bush Administration won't stop at nothing to elevate the status of an embryo so high that we're actually going to create caskets measuring .000000000013th of an inch by .0000000000000000028th of an inch? "Well choose the rosewood."

There are two things to say here.

First, the reaction you will hear from those on the Right is the same reaction you get from them when you mention 60 Minutes. They’ll discredit this story simply because the source it’s coming from is seen as “liberal” in their eyes, and because of that, obviously none of the facts presented here count for anything. They’ll point to Dan Rather (who didn’t even contribute to this story) as a scapegoat simply because he did a poor job on the Bush National Guard story the facts of which still remain to highlight Bush in a very shaky, pussified light, and was determined to have no political bias by a friend of the Kennebunkport vacationing family.

Because of this, the actual merits of Bush’s policy will remain un-debated by most conservatives, and the fact that 60 Minutes produced a great story regarding Bush’s stem cell policy won’t make a difference in the world to them.

When you’re in today’s Republican party, you don’t debate policy; you smear the source that told you about it.

Secondly – the very important issue of Stem Cell Research has absolutely nothing to do with Dan Rather, 60 Minutes, or any kind of journalism. This type of research promises to yield real benefits for living, breathing human beings. The opposition to this of course, has nothing to do with the embryos themselves. Conservatives couldn't give a shit less about fertilized eggs or what we do with them. They're after the abortion issue. The more you can elevate the status of a fertilized egg, the harder it's going to be for the 17-year old living in the projects to get rid of the one growing in her body - or the Republican Congressman's daughter to get rid of hers.

To yield to a small contingent of Religious Right zealots instead of siding with the scientific community on this issue, and then cover your conservative Christian “science” with the marketing term, “Culture of Life,” is so beyond respect, so anti-life and so anti-culture, that those who support president Bush on this issue should fully and completely be ashamed of themselves.

How anyone with a grandparent or parent suffering from Alzheimer’s, a son in a wheelchair due to a spinal chord injury, or a loved one with heart disease could ever make a checkmark next to Bush’s name at the ballot box, is completely and totally beyond me.