Court Rules Against Stem Cell Policy

An anonymous reader sends this quote from Reuters: "A US district court issued a preliminary injunction Monday stopping federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research, in a slap to the Obama administration's new guidelines on the sensitive issue. The court ruled in favor of a suit filed in June by researchers who said human embryonic stem cell research involves the destruction of human embryos. Judge Royce Lamberth granted the injunction after finding that the lawsuit would likely succeed because the guidelines violated law banning the use of federal funds to destroy human embryos. '(Embryonic stem cell) research is clearly research in which an embryo is destroyed,' Lamberth wrote in a 15-page ruling."

Comments

Why the fuss?

[jandersen]

I know where it comes from, historically: the anti-abortionists.

But what makes it so silly is that the same people who oppose this very often approve of the destruction of human life on the grand scale in the form of war, executions or by standing idly by when when those less fortunate than themselves die in misery.

Stemcells, embryonic or otherwise, are just cells. Human stemcells are admittedly human, but they die anyway all the time; we kill human cells all the time simply by living - when you eat food, cells are abraded off your mouth and digested, when you touch something, you leave skincells to die on every surface etc. And in a sense every cell in a body is "embryonic" since it is ultimately derived from an embryo.

I can follow people's sentiment when they are against abortion - it does look rather like killing a newborn baby in some cases - but a newly formed embryo contains less human cells than what you shed when you blow your nose. Nothing to get sentimental about, really.