Hypocrisy of Right to Lifers

Article: “Bush’s faulty logic about stem-cell research” by Michael Kinsey at Slate

I’ve read (and written) quite a bit about the problems I have with our current administration’s adamant refusal to allow stem-cell research. This one is pretty to the point. There is an inherent hypocrisy of the Right to Life campaign…that your right to life ends the moment you are born.

I have a grandmother with Alzheimers. I’ve watched her decline over the last few years to a state of almost perpetual confusion and frustration. Only about a month ago, we came to the realization that we could no longer care for her properly ourselves (and that the attempt to do so is causing my grandfather to neglect his own health) and were forced to place her in a nursing home, where she lives in a wing specially designed for those with Alzheimers or other forms of dementia. The nursing home we placed her in is beautifully designed, clean, with a wonderful staff. Yet, I am reminded, each time I have to punch in the secret code to get into the wing where she lives, how similar it seems to a prison, no matter how beautifully decorated the rooms are or friendly the wardens tend to be.

Stem-cell research is not going to cure her, not now, but I am always reminded how each of her sisters fell to this same disease and how likely it is that my mother, my aunt, or myself could end up in the same position years from now. Stem-cell research offers hope, but not if it is not allowed to come to fruition.

Yet, to Bush, these embryos (embryos that will be destroyed anyway if they are not used to some purpose), they are somehow more important than my grandmother’s life, or my mother’s, or mine. To him, and to all those who oppose the research, you are more important if you aren’t born (and aren’t going to be born) than if you are already alive.

An embryo that hasn’t yet even developed a brain or heart and will be destroyed by the clinic where it was produced has more right to live than a child born with a disease that could be made less severe or even cured, if that embryo had been sacrificed.

Yeah…that makes a lot of sense.