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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."
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!