Slashdot Mirror
Obama To Reverse Bush Limits On Stem Cell Work
An anonymous reader sends this quote from the Associated Press:
"Reversing an eight-year-old limit on potentially life-saving science, President Barack Obama plans to lift restrictions Monday on taxpayer-funded research using embryonic stem cells. ... Under President George W. Bush, taxpayer money for that research was limited to a small number of stem cell lines that were created before Aug. 9, 2001, lines that in many cases had some drawbacks that limited their potential usability. But hundreds more of such lines — groups of cells that can continue to propagate in lab dishes — have been created since then, ones that scientists say are healthier, better suited to creating treatments for people rather than doing basic laboratory science. Work didn't stop. Indeed, it advanced enough that this summer, the private Geron Corp. will begin the world's first study of a treatment using human embryonic stem cells, in people who recently suffered a spinal cord injury. Nor does Obama's change fund creation of new lines. But it means that scientists who until now have had to rely on private donations to work with these newer stem cell lines can apply for government money for the research, just like they do for studies of gene therapy or other treatment approaches."
Anti-abortionists are going to have a field day with this. If stem cells can be harvested from aborted fetuses, and stem cells actually fulfill their promise as everyone expects they will, then getting an abortion suddenly becomes not so much the destruction of one life but the preservation of many.
Embryonic stem cells do not come from aborted fetuses, at least not from the traditional type of abortion. Embryonic stem cells come from left over fertilized eggs at fertility clinics that are to be thrown away. These are thawed, encouraged to begin development, then harvested for stem cells, which destroys them.
(I find it ironic that the last time stem cells came up, someone accused pro-lifers of trying to say that stem comes come from abortions)
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Except your both idiots because stem cells came from nonviable sources that would have been destroyed no matter what to begin with like fertility treatment leftovers and umbilical cords.
Inconvenient how those facts get in the way of righteous anger isn't it?
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
If life begins at conception, then even the harvesting of zygotic embryos is antithetical for anti-abortionists.
If the fertilized eggs are rejected naturally after implantation, that is one thing. If they are separated and destroyed deliberately, that is no longer natural and can only be considered abortion.
Indeed, and now that a reliable method of making stem cells WITHOUT KILLING has been invented.
Yes, precisely! There are proven stem cell treatments accomplished without killing human embryos:
Many stem cells can be obtained from IVF clinics -- in fact, they have many embryos, and often do tests [using a single cell] to see if there is anything wrong with the embryos. Many embryos are left frozen or discarded.
There is a vast potential for stem cell based research. If we develop science and technology to selectively differentiate the cells, it would be good for all.
Morality is relative. At one time, sex not intended for procreation was considered "immoral". With science developing, all that is needed for stem cells is just a sample of sperm and an egg. The term "killing a baby" is a strong term -- almost as inappropriate as using it to describe birth control.
S
Given the deep moral objection a significant part of the community has to the use of embryonic stem cells, and given that it looks like there have been large advances in the use of adult and other stem cells, why lift the funding ban? I mean, all other things being equal, wouldn't it be better to not wander into a moral gray area?
As I understand it, one of the major points of the ban was to discourage the field from becoming reliant on stem cells that required further destruction of embryos. I might be wrong, but from my understanding great leaps have been doing just that - that adult and other non-destructive forms of stem cell research have been fruitful. If that's the case, I don't understand the point of lifting the ban other than for purely political purposes.
I honestly don't understand how the "destruction of embryos" for medical research is worse than the "destruction of embryos" for IVF. The only difference I can see is that IVF is a procedure that conservatives have done all the time, while medical research is done by the evil liberal scientists.
All this hand-waving over stem cells strikes me as dishonest. The people who call killing embryos for research a tragedy have no problem letting them die en masse in other circumstances. For example, why aren't they pushing for medical technology to save every last fertilized ovum? I guess life isn't as important as scoring political points.
"Reversing an eight-year-old limit on potentially life-saving science..." Currently unproven to save even one life, but proven to destroy human embryos.
To back up my post:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stem_cell#Embryonic
Chicken and egg problem, we know so little about stem cells that I do not know whether it is possible to make stem cells available by another route. If we discover that it is possible to remove this method of acquiring cells for research then the method can be stopped at a later date removing the religious objection.
On another front it is clear that religious intervention in science has severely limited the progress of some societies on Earth. Religion does change its interpretation of what the fundamental rules of living should be as societies change and science provides more accurate knowledge about the world but it often takes many lifetimes for this adjustment to occur.
All societies are facing severe threats from the overpopulation of the world, resource shortages, climate change and poverty. Scientific progress is the only source of solutions to these problems unless we are prepared to allow the problems to multiply to the point where a dramatic population crash occurs. We are at a crossroads, the choice is in our hands, use our creativity and intelligence to take charge of our own destiny or allow our environment to expell us. 2000 year old books prefer the second solution, by default they select the lemmings fate of allowing the environment to kill us off.
Pick you side, I know which one I find more human.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
How can a pregnancy be aborted if there is no pregnancy at all?
I was told that Bush prohibited all stem-cell science when fetal tissue was involved. The article seems to imply that he only limited federal funding for such science.
You were 'told' wrong. The article is correct. There was no blanket ban on stem cell research. Just no govt funding of new embryonic stem cell research. Fed funding for other stem cell research was ok, as was private funding for any stem cell research.
Nice attempt but aside from the non-embryo sources of embryonic cells you're also arguing for respecting one establishment of religion's views over the rest, arguing that both fertility treatments and deriving benefit from what would otherwise be wasted is evil, AND inconsistently with your OWN logic arguing that it's also evil to try to derive some good from something you consider evil and thus work against the evilness of it.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Well, of course *life* begins at conception, thats not the point. We have no problem destroying all kinds of life. Ever swat a mosquito? Ever eat a salad?
Arguing about where life begins is misleading, since its not life that we respect, but that certain something that makes us "human". To some people this is sentience - once the fetus developes an active brain, it should be given the same rights as humans. For others, it is a "soul", or some other etherial, hard-to-pin-down item that makes us different from other, "lower", life forms.
Based on the assumptions that the a "soul" is what makes us special, and that a "soul" is given at conception, the logical conclusion is that abortions are wrong because it is the killing of what essentially amounts to a human being. I submit, however, that the assumptions that this conclusion is based upon are absurd. Not because they *could not* be so, but because there is no evidence (or even a compelling reason to believe) that it *is so*.
I further submit that the only logical way to determine the point at which a fertilized egg becomes worthy of the protections afforded to humans is by noting when it developes those characteristics of humans that we believe sets us appart. We cannot observe a soul, nor can we demonstrate its existance. We can, though, determine when the brain develops, determine when the fetus becomes sentient in some small way.
Not even a dozen posts in we already have shitheads bemoaning that 'babies die' when these cells are harvested.
1. According to the Department of Bioethics, anywhere between sixty to eighty percent of fertilized eggs fail to attach to the uterus naturally.
2. Though a precursor to a fully formed human being, these little balls of cells have neither brains nor senses. They have no qualia, no conscious phenomena. They are at most minuscule fragments of tissue - kind of like the smears most of you leave on the sheets at night.
3. If the cells that precede the formation of a human being that will never grow to become even a fetus, much less a fully formed infant, can be used to save lives that exist today, why not? A human that will never be is effectively dead.
4. All of these things can be taken into consideration without devaluing conscious human life, because conscious human life this is not.
We're not giving permission to Anton LaVey to tear the fetuses of misbegotten children from the rancid wombs of unwed women of color while Marilyn Manson and 50 Cent plays over the back alley abortion clinic's P.A. system, you stupid fucking hicks. If you believe that human life begins 'when the sperm hits the germ' then every mother that has attempted to get pregnant and failed repeatedly could very probably be guilty of negligent homicide because of point number one.
And besides, we can get plenty of cells from elsewhere so the debate is now largely moot save for those few situations where adult cells may not suffice.
Life does not begin at conception, the sperm and egg cells that exists before conception are very much alive themself already. Albeit lacking the ability to divide into anything useful without first combining their genetic materials and finding a generous donor of nutrients and growing space.
As for the eggs, the fertility treatment doesn't work by picking out one egg, fertilizing it, putting it into a female and then seeing if it falls out again or gets stuck. It's more like picking a basket of eggs, fertilizing them all, screening them for defects, picking out the best one(s) and putting them back into the mother. This leaves us with a basket of motherless embryos(or zygotes in the early stages, but still motherless)(which in reality looks something like a basket full of seemingly empty petri dishes, not a pile of screaming dying babies as some would prefer us to belive). Calling them aborted is retarded simply because they aren't.
Oh, and they're only called fetuses after 8 weeks. they're embryos until then. And as they'll be put to the torch either way, why not try to derive something useful from them? If a few human cells lacking a nervous system is of so great importance then the prospect of saving several billions of human cells with a nervous system by providing reconstruction of failed organs and systems should be a national top priority.
Currently unproven to save even one life, but proven to destroy human embryos.
Fortunately, they're a renewable resource.
Life does not begin at conception, it merely gets passed on. Life began long long long ago and is still being passed on today.
MP3 Search Engine
The difference is between taking part in evil (destroyed embryos due to fertility treatments) versus having no part in it. There are some things that the government should have nothing to do with.
This is the government having nothing to do with it. Now decisions on what research is needed and is ethical will be taken by ethics committees and funding bodies and not by politicians who don't understand either the ethics or the science and are trying to grab votes. Its really impossible to argue for or against embryonic stem cell research as a whole - each piece of research should be judged on its own merits by the right people. Blanket bans are wrong.
A conservative is a liberal with a teenage daughter :)
MP3 Search Engine
And that prohibition led to surreal situations where they had to keep two of every piece of equipment, one for federally funded work, and one for private - right down to electricity bills. (as demonstrated in the BBC TV Horizon program A War on Science).
But it means that scientists who until now have had to rely on private donations to work with these newer stem cell lines can apply for government money for the research,
Because the State of California is giving out private donations?
I was kind of pissed at Bush for blocking federal funding on new lines until I really thought about it for awhile. There's nothing that precludes researchers from doing research on new lines.
If people wanted this so bad, what prevented them from pulling out their checkbooks? Hello, there, Silicon Valley. There's lots of rich people there. How about a donation? You, too, Hollywood, if this is such a big issue.
As to why Obama's doing it, well, two reasons. First, it satisfies a niche constituency, who like to see abortion-related topics pressed to the forefront at every opportunity. Second, his tax plan does probably kill off the possibility of private funding.
(I'm pro-choice, BTW. But to look past Obama's shallow political motives, and to ignore the reality of the situation while Bush was president is very foolish.)
The whole controversy over the "life beings at conception" is completely religious, and affects only the Abrahamic faiths. In Asia and other parts of the world it is a non-issue.
I wish you would apply your moral panic to causes that could actually help people.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
Sperm cells and egg cells are demonstrably alive and demonstrably human -- they contain human DNA (although they're short half their chromosomes).
A woman kills a potential future baby with every period. A man kills millions of them with every wet dream, to say nothing of, uh, other activities. In fact, a man kills millions of them even when he DOES make a baby with one of them.
These protesters really are pathetic. How much energy do they put into stopping the mass murder of actual, real, not potential, human beings in Darfur or the Congo, I'd like to know?
I piss off bigots.
"Tell the date when stem cell research will cure..."
The day pissants without a clue stop bitching about funding science.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Just remember any anti aging effects are purely temporary...
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
Life begins much earlier than conception. You cannot take a dead egg and a dead sperm and make anything living out of it. Stop co-mingling the idea of life with the idea of sexual reproduction, and you'll realize that there's a lot of life out there, and only some of it is sexual. Even in sexual organisms, living sperm and eggs are not where life begins; they are literally byproducts of the life they are made from.
Life is a continuum. Of course, now that I've stated the only consistent obvious rationalization, you'll definitely agree.
The millennia of pre-scientific religious training is the barrier that's prompting people to pipe up and say, "Well when I said Life I didn't mean it that way. I meant we as-in super-special HUMAN animal life." Which again doesn't make sense from the human angle, because you can't take a dead human sperm and a dead human egg and make a living anything either.
So what it boils down to is the "super-special" part. We become super-special at inception, and to prove it to ourselves, we'll state that we have an exclusive something that no other animal in the universe has. So we don't get called out on it, let's make it undetectable. Call it a soul, if you will.
Now all the arguments boil down to, "The soul is first present at inception." Which is actually a decent argument, even if it can never be proven or dis-proven. But somehow it feels like a hollow argument, like you're not really arguing for your betterment. It's almost like you're arguing for the preservation of the Church, and you really couldn't give a damn if it means that Alzheimer's disease is cured as long as nobody shatters the super-special soul idea the Church has created which makes you better than everything else that's alive, with the exception of Jesus, who despite being alive hasn't been seen for 2000 years.
The arguments concerning "independent self sustaining" to equate to life don't make sense; infants are far from independent or self-sustainable for years. The arguments for possibly self-sustainable outside the womb equates to life don't make sense either. Possibly doesn't indicate the percentage of chance, so it could range from 100% to 0%. Assuming you dictate that it has to be more than 0%, I can pick a percentage so small that it's practially zero.
But the "possibly could be self-sustaining" is a tilted argument in other ways too. A severely premature child in a hospital is in no way self-sustaining. It's a wonder that we have such a good success rate at keeping them alive. And sooner or later the technology will be developed to have a in-vitrio child. Then the outside-the-womb self-sustaining argument won't even make sense, as the technique will remove the womb from the picture.
Perhaps we'll never develop out-of-the-womb pregnancies. But if we do not, I'll wager that it has more to do with researchers leaving certain aspects of our development untouched due to respect or fear of nearly two millennia of reasoning not based on observation, but based on patting ourselves on the back due to our super-special-nees. We have souls, hooray for us!
no.. PARASITE begins at conception... it's not a discrete life until it can survive outside of its host (mother) without teh aid of modern medical technology.
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
You seem to imply that George W. Bush actually championed the cause of embryonic stem cell research. He *vetoed* the bill that allowed federal funding for embryonic stem cell research [with new cell lines beyond the already available lines -- fewer than 20?].
This reminds me of an assertion that George W Bush made in one of the debates with Al Gore, that he [Bush] got the legislation passed on Patients Bill of Rights as governor of TX. However, the truth is that he vetoed that bill, the legislation then overrode his veto, and then he claimed credit for signing it.
S
Stem cells are used currently for the treatment of leukemia and lymphoma.
Let me give you an historical analogy:
But I'll ask you this. If you think I'm wrong, then please tell me how. Tell the date when the Maxwell's equations will give any useful results. Tell me when the Maxwell equations will give us public lighting, electric cars, computers. What's the date that's going to happen by? Just give me a date that you can guarantee success by.
See how stupid that sounded? Nevertheless, it was indeed quite a long time before the unification of electromagnetism by Maxwell gave any practical results. So, just because you don't have any use for them in the near future, don't mean that they are worthless.
This is basic science. People trying to understand the processes of life. Cell differentiation, growth, ageing. It can have implications in almost any field of biology. So don't try to tell what is useful science and what isn't until you have some scientific training.
entropy happens
I may be wrong, but once a line is grown doesn't it self-propogate? It's like cutting a part of a plant and putting it into the ground where it grows into a new plant.
If that's the case, and one of these stem cell lines cures diabetes or helps people with spinal injuries walk again - I think that the one potential life the embryo could have been (if the embryo was even viable) is a relatively cheap price for curing some of the greatest physical ills of our modern society.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
I think the life begins at conception idea is just a left over from ancient attempts at science. It uses the same ideas behind "Spontaneous generation", that life comes from inanimate matter.
Under the "Spontaneous generation" theory, life comes from non-living matter under the right conditions. Rain water mixed with mud will generate frogs. Meat left to rot will generate flies. Presence of pre-existing life is not a requirement.
For all the benefit that Aristotle bestowed on mankind, his dabblings in the realm of Science put it back for hundreds of years. He was good at forming logical arguments that were quite reasonable. For science you also have to deeply scrutinize the actual world, something that wasn't as easily available to him at the time. His fame (he is Aristotle) then drove his ideas into the world as "facts"; an error that Aristotle would never have permitted if he were alive at the time.
Louis Pasteur finally proved that Aristotle was completely wrong. The Church pre-exists Pasteur, and most of it's doctrine was written pre-Pasteur. So it's easy to see why strongly religious people believe that life is created at birth. They're completely wrong too, but they're going to be far too busy bickering about when birth occurs to think about Pasteur. The message that they should learn is that life is not created, but preserved through offspring.
In a traditional religious culture, the idea that life is preserved through offspring runs counter to idea of spontaneous generation is a fact. Spontaneous generation is deeply rooted in the Bible, as it would be in any book of it's age. Adam and Eve were never represented as having to develop. Moses's staff turned into a snake. Abraham's son Issac was spared from being sacrificed by a sheep that suddenly appeared entangled in a bush. The entire universe was made, and made quickly. After being raised to accept such examples, it's almost forgivable to think that life is created, but it is still completely wrong; life is a continuum that you pass on to your children.
because it forced researchers to find other viable sources of stem cells. Several studies have noted that embryonic stem cells have a high incidence of becoming cancerous. Stem cells from other sources have a lower incidence.
I don't really care to wade into the abortion-debate muck, particularly as abortion has nothing to do with the stem cells we're talking about. Those are obtained from fertility clinics, and created by people who are SO "pro-life" that they leave plenty of discarded excess life behind in the freezer.
However, what frustrates me to a greater degree is this myth that stem cell research has been "restricted". 90+ percent of people on the street (and probably even a majority of Slashdot posters here) mistakenly believe that the evil Bush administration "banned" or "outlawed" stem cell research. That's simply not true. The last administration refused to SUBSIDIZE it, and that's all. Researchers have been under no restriction whatsoever to do any of this research, as long as they're not sucking off the taxpayer teat for their funds.
This opens up an entirely separate debate on private sources of medical research funds, and why pharmaceutical companies now pay more in marketing than they do in R&D. I'll leave that debate to others. However, are we REALLY so drunk on "stimulus" spending for everything under the sun these days, that refusing to subsidize a particular item means that item is actively "restricted"?
Bush's PR department was awesome. You just need to catch up with the times.
The trick is to cry that everyone's out to get you, and that they only report things in a one-sided manner, but then to make sure that your side is the only one reported. Remember when the Democrats were blocking things in Congress under his administration? How was that possible with a Republican majority?
Bush effectively killed an entire branch of developmental science in the US. Labs shut down and people lost their jobs. Labs brave enough to continue on had to do so out of their own pocket. If it wasn't an aberration that fertility clinics make a ton of money from people willing to pay anything to have a child, no research on stem cells would have ever occurred in the United States.
So now we're almost ten years behind the rest of the world in discovering treatments with what amounts to a silver bullet that can actually replace dying tissues. That means that in the future, you'll have to import the treatments from other countries or fly there for treatment. Due to religion, America loses yet another manufacturing opportunity.
Did he plan it this way? I don't think so, I think he's just a good church-going guy who is willing to watch Science go to Hell because he believes the arguments that Scientists don't like Jesus.
Bush's PR only took a dive when the facts got so out-of-hand that he couldn't cover them up with more Fox News.
The whole controversy over the "life beings at conception" is completely religious, and affects only the Abrahamic faiths. In Asia and other parts of the world it is a non-issue.
It's funny that you would mention Asia. Traditionally in East Asian cultures a child was considered to be one year old at birth because they counted the gestation period as the first year of life. Granted this tradition is slowly changing, but is still the norm in some countries. So no, this does not only affect "Abrahamic faiths".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asian_age_reckoning
So since infants are unable to process logic and reason, use their opposite thumbs, walk errect, communicate with a complex speech system then they aren't worthy of the protection afforeded to humans? All of these are characteristics of humans that set us apart from the rest of the beasts, but dont actually develop until several years after birth.
At the moment of birth, there is very little physiological change to the baby. What little there is is strictly related to the respiratory/circulatory system and the umbillical cord. It is a very poor landmark to use when determining "viability" or "humanity". A baby in the womb about to pop out is no more nor less human than one born 5 minutes ago.
I bet that there are NO cures for cancer, NO blind man seeing, and NO crippled people walking due to stem cell research, in our lifetimes. All of this talk about the immediate need to fund stem cell research is just so much hype.
[...]
The reason that stem cell research needs federal funding is because THERE ARE NO CURES IN SIGHT FOR ANYTHING FROM THEM.
Actually there are MANY current studies using stem cells, and in particular embryonic stem cells, in promising treatments for a large range of diseases. Some of them are already approved for human trials and therefore will probably see the light in mainstream medicine in very few years.
One example of such applications: restoring locomotion after spinal chord injury, a study that was cleared by the FDA for human trials a little over a month ago.
Dude, if you have no idea what you are talking about, it's better to moderate your own opinions.
How do you even dare to call them "pro-lifers"? They are murderers guilty of effectively killing anyone who could be saved by methods derived from this kind of research. Stopping fertility clinics isn't "pro-life" either, it's about nothing but banning person A from doing things disliked by person B's religion.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Of course it's scientific and not religious, and intelligent design is too.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Your grandma is dead because her brain is dead. The brain is necessary (but not sufficient) for a human being to exist, and it defines what a human being is.
Zygotes and embryos don't have human brains either, which is why they are not human beings either. Until they get a developed human brain, they are no different from a kidney or liver.
no you made a politely worded argument that, while politely worded, is nonetheless patronising and demeaning.
Ad hominem doesn't necessarily mean blunt.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
So because I don't agree with what you're saying, I'm just supposed to be quiet or risk being called a troll?
The fact is that I do believe what you're talking about is wrongheaded for the reasons given (and more). I'm not going to praise it when I'm arguing against it, and I'm under no obligation to praise people with whom I disagree. I believe that I am under an obligation to be polite about it, which is more than I can say about most libs nowadays.
The fact is that I do believe you and many others are deceived by the MSM. You said it was you and the MSM were deceived, but you were really only half right.
"I know that every word that man just said is true, because it's EXACTLY what I wanted to hear." -- Space Ghost
If Congress wants to pass Steam Cell Legislation this is sure to pass the Senate. There are 5 Mormon senators (4 Republicans, 1 Democrat) who voted for Embryonic Steam Cell research twice during Bush's presidency.
Orrin Hatch who the RIAA's lap dog, personally appealed to Bush to pass the legislation...I suppose that is about the only thing he is good for...
No, the ban was on government funding of the research. It wasn't ever illegal to do the research.
This means that the government is now going to pay for it.
By that reasoning, murder is a completely religious concept. In Asia (particularly the communist parts) and other parts of the world it is a non-issue.
I guess we need to get rid of that silly, archaic "Abrahamic" prescription against the taking of life too. We have to be totally secular and consistent in our reasoning, right?
Actually the true definition of government having nothing to do with this is for it hand out no money at all. But maybe we have different definitions of "nothing."
The whole fact that life begins at conception is biological/scientific...The fact is, science shows that the child is a distinct lifeform from its mother from the moment of conception...
You are almost completely correct in those statements - if you revise your definition of life to that life which reproduces sexually, you are 100% correct.
Let me restrict the scope of this argument to only animal life (which most definitely includes humans), and let me once again concur wholeheartedly that in this case, life most certainly begins at conception.
The right to life is not a purely human right; it is inherent in all living organisms, even cockroaches. To claim otherwise is to claim that human life is somehow more important than that of other animals - more holy, if you will - and this is the epitome of hubris.
We humans simply find this concept inconvenient, and so we tend to restrict our concept of rights to "persons", rather than lifeforms as a whole. This does not mean those other lifeforms do not have rights; it simply means we ignore them.
If a person were truly arguing a right to life at conception from a scientific point of view, then s/he would condemn all killing of all animals regardless of the possible good that may come of it. They'd definitely be vegans.
The problem is that even folks who claim no religious mindset fail to realize that they have been raised in a culture that began with a fundamentalist mentality, and that they have absorbed some of those concepts without realizing it. If you believe that human life is more important than other life, you have absorbed fundamentalist doctrine.
Due to the inconvenience of supporting a lifeform's rights, most people have instead chosen to ignore these and support a person's rights.
Now, for the second issue in your argument:
Granting of "personhood" is a legal distinction that has no basis in science...
...
...the child is a distinct lifeform from its mother from the moment of conception, the law has chosen to ignore that until the child is completely removed from the womb.
Not technically correct, here. Personhood is a social concept, not a legal one. It is a social concept that has been held by humans across the globe and across time, most likely beginning before the first laws were ever devised.
When to grant an individual personhood in a society depends on that society - usually the law follows after, not before.
In the case of the U.S., most people agree that personhood begins at birth (I follow that personhood begins when an individual becomes useful to society, but I'm in a very outspoken minority here). The law here is even stricter: the Supreme Court in Roe v Wade effectively declared personhood to begin at the point a fetus becomes viable (i.e., able to exist outside the mother). This seems fair, and I'm willing to live with it, even if I don't agree.
As long as we get our terminology right ("life" vs "personhood"), there is no dispute.
Couldn't agree more.
Kind of like how you're aborting a child by allowing a woman to have her period and not impregnating her first?
I wish you would apply your moral panic to causes that could actually help people.
This. I don't get the outrage of stem cells for this reason. I can understand how religious people can feel harvesting embryos or whatever is wrong. But if it's wrong, it's a wrong done with at least good intentions, that harms no one (abortions are not going to stop, stem cell research or not). There's so much going on thats wrong in this world, even in this country. Ethnic cleansing, human rights abuses, etc. In our country alone, the government steals from the poor and gives to the rich, imprisons millions for drugs and puts them in a prison system that is completely overrun with racism, violence, drugs, sexual abuse, and sexually transmitted diseases. For a religon based on teachings of tolerance, love for your enemy, forgiveness, and redemption, you would think the state of our for-profit-prisons would have the "religious right" outraged! Somehow I think Christ would be more concerned about helping those on the very bottom of our society, then condemning Doctors bending their ethics to potentially help make the lame walk again (in fact I hear he was a big fan of healing cripples).
It seems to me you could easily spend your entire life fighting whats wrong in this world, and never even get around to stem cells. It's a small, pathetic issue to crusade against. But I suppose because it is small, it is easy to divert your attention to, easy to cope with. After all, the big issues would require you to look with open eyes, and maybe admit you were wrong. That would take humility, and I'm pretty sure Jesus was strongly against that, if the leaders of the religious right are any example.
So since infants are unable to process logic and reason, use their opposite thumbs, walk errect, communicate with a complex speech system then they aren't worthy of the protection afforeded to humans? All of these are characteristics of humans that set us apart from the rest of the beasts, but dont actually develop until several years after birth.
Indeed, this has been my argument that infants have no rights as people. Thank you for stating it so clearly.
I guess that could be true. More likely, however, it's a logical and convenient line that defines the start of human life. You can wait a long time, but a sperm will always be a sperm. However, after fertilization, under ordinary conditions, that bitty blob will become a human life. Any line you draw past that point is pretty arbitrary and subject to a lot of hand-waving.
(Cue "fertilization vs. implantation" arguments.)
You've got miracles confused with the teaching of spontaneous generation.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
"Abortion" in this context doesn't necessarily mean that a pregnancy is aborted but that the life of a conceived but unborn child is aborted.
This assumes that
A) an abortion can happen outside of a pregnancy
B) a conceived "child" made up of less than [arbitrary number of cells] = life.
C) an [arbitrary number of cells] that was never, is not, and won't be implanted in a womb = unborn
Not everyone would agree with those two assumption. And I don't know of any legal or dictionary deifinition that assumes an abortion can take place anywhere other than in utero.
Trying to change the definition of a word in mid-discussion makes the entire enterprise pointless.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Life continues at conception.
http://sourcemage.org/ - Have fun
Actually, according to biology, no new life is created at conception, all current life has began exactly once about 3.5 billion years ago, and we are all part of an uninterrupted lineage.
Deus est fatalis
Define "failure". In fact, define "Obama's plan". He's got a dozen of them going right now.
The economic stimulus plan? He's taking criticism from both sides. For every expert you can dredge up to say that it will make things worse, I can find you a critic whose primary problem is that the plan is too small to cover the gap between the economy's current output and its potential output.
The bank bailout plan? Obama has a lot to be criticized for here, but A) it's a really thorny and complex problem, and B) most of the "experts" agree that doing nothing would have been ruinous, and C) a lot of the criticism is demanding emergency nationalization, not half-measures. The government should jump in, declare many of the biggest banks insolvent, wipe out the shareholders, and run the banks until they can find private investors.
By "the majority of indicators," you actually mean "the stock market." The stock market is a lousy proxy for the economic confidence of the country for a variety of reasons. Its view is too narrow, because half the stocks in this country are owned by the wealthiest 1% of Americans, because a rising DJIA only tells you how a relative handful of entrenched companies are doing, and because things that are good for the economy as a whole can be really bad for individual stocks.
For example, the only reason the stocks of some of the banks are still trading above zero: investors believe that Obama will probably keep the government bailout money trickling in, rather than swooping in and wiping out the current investors. I believe that the latter plan would be far better for the economy as a whole, but it would be bad for at least that sector of the stock market.
Also, as a commenter on the previous link pointed out, the stock market dropped 24% after Reagan took office, not because investors were made nervous by Reagan's free market talk, but because there were real problems that needed to be sorted out before growth would resume. Pretending that the stock market is a proxy for America's actual confidence in Obama's policies (forget the 62% approval rating) is a bald-faced lie that you Right-wingers will drop like a plague-ridden dead cat as soon as the market starts recovering.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
The term "abortion" already has a meaning, actually, and this is an attempt to confuse what is actually happening with that meaning.
You should pick a different term, though it's quite clear why you choose not to.
Literally.
Short answer:
There is nothing in the US Constitution about funding research. Research should be done by private entities that will seek the most likely routes to solve the biggest problems instead of the mostly likely to buy votes.
Are tapeworms any less "alive" than other organisms? What about a man on dialysis? Normally I suspect I'd agree with you but that is a shit-poor argument.l
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
You were told incorrectly. Bush was the first President to allow Federal funding of fetal stem cell research ever. So the rancor is not about whether he "allowed" it, but that he didn't walk into a brand new, unproven field of research with a blank check and no strings attached.
Hate to break it to you, but GP (LordKazan) did say the following:
(emphasis mine)
His statement only refers to the possibility of survival outside of its host without the aid of (modern) technology. A healthy child carried full term -can- survive once born. Sure, if you then leave them in a trash bin, they're likely to die, but if taken proper care for, it should grow up quite nicely.. whether that be in the care of the biological mother or another person. A child brought into the world after only the first trimester, however, simply stands no chance whatsoever.. not even -with- current technology, I reckon. Ergo, that would not be discrete life.
He also mentions 'until'. So to some of the below replies - no, his statement has no bearing on those who have -already- been quite capable of surviving.
I agree with you that the term 'parasite' can be taken quite broadly (as per another replyer below, one might argue that embryonic stem cell researchers taking government funds are 'parasites' of society), and thus disagree with the use of this term by LordKazan. His main point, however, stands... he believes that life only begins IF and when the child would reasonably be capable of survival and brought into the world, under natural circumstances. It's not what I, personally, believe (I do think that technological advances stretch where the definition of 'life' begins, although I wouldn't go so far as believing that any fertilized egg fits the definition of life if scientists develop an artificial womb at some point; where I would draw the line? No idea.), but I respect what he believes and don't think his opinion deserves being twisted around to fit situations he clearly did not intend for his opinion to be applied to.
"Until they get a developed human brain"
But then you just move the whole issue of "where does life begin" to "when is a human brain 'developed'"?
E.g. the brains of children born under Fetal Alcohol Syndrome are generally regarded as 'underdeveloped'. Are they then not alive?
I'm not a pro-lifer trying to split hairs, but I do think that any definition of "Life begins at..." needs to set -very- exact parameters and "developed brain" is not very exact.
Kind of like how you're aborting a child by allowing a woman to have her period and not impregnating her first?
Having a period (for a woman) or laying an unfertilized egg (for a hen) means that no sperm penetrated an egg, ergo no conception, ergo no new diploid organism to abort.
Fine, but that's irrelevant, as virtually no pro-choicers are going around claiming that it should be OK to abort a baby right up to a few minutes before it pops out ... that's just a strawman.
We cannot observe a soul, nor can we demonstrate its existance.
That's because it does not exist.
What was once thought to be "soul", is our brain's mental activity. Without it we may have something that is both human and alive (like, a bag of human blood) yet not a person. And not even any brain activity qualifies because certainly we do not recognize animals as persons, as their brain is too primitive to do anything that we can recognize as human. The "problem" is, human brain not only develops the capacity for such activity very late in development, the actual activity does not start until some time after birth.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Women are pregnant for 12 months in East Asia? Weird.
So, here is one for everyone saying it is abortion.
Lets consider that killing a fertilized embryo that is laying on a dish is abortion. Since those embryos on the clinics are already fertilized, what should be done with them ? You can't keep them frozen forever. Forever is not only an extremely long time (doh!), but the embryo won't survive forever. You can't also implant them all. Both of those scenarios are impossible.
So, what would you do ? If you keep them frozen forever, and they die, is that abortion ? (You knew beforehand that would eventually die). If you put them on a dish and let them die, is that abortion ? Or maybe the idea is to ban fertilization clinics, so the problem doesn't arise ?
What about the fact (also known beforehand) that not all implanted embryos will survive ?
morcego