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Stem Cell Bill Passes in Australia
nickd writes "Having recently being passed in the Senate by only 2 votes, an Australian bill to overturn the ban on 'theraputic cloning' has now been passed in the House of Representatives by 82-62. The amendment that was seeking to prevent stem cells being extracted from the eggs of aborted late term female fetuses has also been voted down. The changes will allow scientists to create and use embryos up to 14 days old for research."
People can volunteer for experimentation right now.
Too abd this isn't about people, it's about a ball of about 128 cells.
Or do yo cry for all the 'people' that your body sheds every day?
I have volunteered myself. I have no problem with experiments on humans (read: people) as long as the person agrees to it. My problem is the potential for women to get pregnant so they can get an abortion and get paid by an equally unscrupulous scientist. Why not pay little Betty $100 to get an abortion instead of the $1000 it would cost to get the "material" from a reputable source. (prices and fees entirely fabricated, of course)
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Give it up. Demolish your church. Sack your minister. Recycle your leaflets. Put your books in the library in the fiction section. Distribute your church's wealth to something worthwhile.
See the cosmos as it is, not as you would wish it to be.
Tell your kids it was all a bad dream.
Apologise to society at large.
Get up off your knees.
Take responsibility.
> Why not pay little Betty $100 to get an abortion instead of the $1000 it would cost to get the "material" from a reputable source.
Err... because that would be illegal, just like any unregulated trafficing in illegal tissue. Same reason Betty won't sell you her kidney.
There's already laws to protect 'little Betty' from unethical harvesting, the only thing the ban is about is whether it's ethical at any level to use discarded blastocytes or embroyos (sp?), so fundamentally it's an issue of whether you consider the embroyo sentient. Trying to make it a free market issue is just silly and distracting (probably the latter is why you wrote what you did.)
Good point. However, saying that this will not create a market for aborted children (yes, I called them children), is equally silly. Maybe Betty won't see the benefits, but the clinics, the scientist, or whoever does the collection/harvesting will.
You are correct that this is an abortion issue. I consider a growing baby (call it whatever you want) an honest to goodness human being. Having a two month old at home changes your perspective. I have no reason to love my daughter. Honestly, all she does it eat, shit cry, and not occasionally enough, sleep. She can do little more than she could as a "blastocyst" (as I've heard it called). She barely discovered her hands, I'd hardly call her sentient. I love her because of the person she will become. I love her because of her potential.
I see this stem cell debate being pushed by those "pro-choice" people who are looking for benefits to abortion. It serves their agenda to have unborn children made into something other than humans. They call them "blastocysts, fetuses, genetic material, but never unborn children. All that aside, when it comes to stem cells, they have yet to give me an decent, honest answer to these questions:
What's wrong with the stem cell lines we already have?
Why the push to create endless stem cell lines when a stem cell will reproduce to more and more stem cells forever?
Why are we wasting money, time and energy creating more stem cell lines when those resources could be spent on the actual research?
What's wrong with adult stem cell research?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
So only fundamentalist Christians are made a bit uncomfortable with some of these new concepts of cloning, use of aborted embryos for research. I would find that a bit surprising. Perhaps this just looks like a good opportunity to insult some group of people that you disagree with, while adding nothing to the debate. Big surprise there.
Actually, as far as I can tell, Fundamentalist Christians have objections to the concept of Women's Lib.
Observe.
Originally, the argument was that Women should be subservient to men. This was added when King James re-wrote the bible as an "interpretation."
Next, the argument was that women should be at home, married, with children. They could run the household, sure, as long as the man didn't care.
Then, it was "Birth Control is for Harlots", and they ran around either harassing, firebombing, or in general making it very, very difficult to find for a rather long time. (The current "I'm sorry, I may be paid to fill your prescriptions, but I refuse because you're a whore." theme with some southern pharmacists is a throwback to this.)
After that sunk, the next argument was that Abortion is murder. The Embryo is sacred life, and aborting it before it becomes able to live on it's own is evil and wrong. (Important note: Fundamentalists, as a whole, don't care what happens after the kid is born, just beforehand.)
The current argument is that the mere PREVENTION of pregnancy is murder -- at least when the prevention comes from a purely chemical means. (Unless you're daring to try and make condoms available to poor people, that's apparently bad too.) This is the official reasoning for the objections to the Morning After pill. Of course, this intentionally (at least, I hope it's intentional misdirection and not unintentional ignorance) ignores the fact that the Morning After pill is not a "take a pill, your baby is dead" situation, but rather, "You take a pill, your womb prevents the egg from being fertilized".
There's only a few common themes here. If you take the most recent arguments, you get a trend that the real argument is "Women -- or people in general -- shouldn't be allowed to enjoy sex". If you take the arguments a bit further, you get a trend that says "Women do not have the right to make their own decisions" -- be it reproductive decisions, legal decisions, what have you.
But, anyway.
The Stem Cell research bit is wrapped up in this. You see, you can't really avoid being against Stem Cell research when you are still trying to put on a public face about being against abortion due to "honestly" believing that life begins at orgasm. (Not conception, since with the Morning After pill, there is no conception that takes place. Again, that's the entire point of the morning after pill.) (Nevermind that every time someone goes to a fertility clinic, the same stem cells get created at Fertility Clinics -- indeed, most stem cells for research COME from Fertility Clinics.
Of course, calling Fertility doctors "mass murders" and putting pictures of their faces, homes, and children up on websites (in a King Henry the 2nd, "Who will rid me of this troublesome Heretic" type situation) would probably get a bit of a backlash, considering that, well, who's going to complain about doctors being able to help infertile couples have children?
But hey, "genocidal, devil worshiping Nazi-doctor-like abortionists" like those evil stem cell researchers? Sure thing!
Wow, only religious nuts make absolute statements like this with no empirical evidence or rationality. Please quote the verse of the Bible where each of your three assertions is unambiguously stated.
If looks fun, though. Let's try it: All religious people are nuts. If you disagree, you eat babies.
And I think you are not a scientist or in any way familiar with genetic research, so you should probably go sit down somewhere with your ridiculous Bible and leave the logical people alone now. Sound good, champ?