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by Crystal Chapman
If a doctor working in a country with little respect for human rights can see a problem with using human beings for spare parts, why can't we?
“We recoil at the idea of growing human
beings for spare body parts,” said President Bush, in his national address
regarding his decision to fund limited embryonic stem cell research.
He also said that he hoped to “foster respect for life in America and
throughout the world.” His words
are both comforting and cryptic in light of the stem cell debate’s
similarities with another situation:
A
Chinese doctor whose work helped heal countless burn victims and even restored
sight to the blind in China is seeking asylum in the United States because he
said his conscience had been “tortured.”
Dr. Wang Guoqi extracted for transplantation, skin, corneas, and kidneys,
from executed prisoners without their consent.
According to the Washington Post, Wang is
especially troubled by the memory of a man whose executioner botched the job and
handed him over to him and other surgeons who skinned, gutted, and threw him
half-dead into a plastic bag, and then loaded him unceremoniously onto a flatbed
truck. That was the last Wang saw
of him—except perhaps in his nightmares.
Even if some nice people got those organs
and went on to live productive lives, even if the organs’ $15,000 price tag
funded great strides in medical research, even if the man was going to die
anyway, there’s still the gruesome ring of rottenness about using people as
though they were inventory in a junkyard salvage store.
“The fact that a living being is going
to die does not justify experimenting on it,” the president said. In this, he
seemed to be trying to avoid the slippery slope of devaluing human life that
lands us in a situation like that of China’s unfortunate inmates. In allowing funding for only those stem cell lines already
established--meaning no funds for further destruction of embryos, he quelled a
portion of the debate temporarily, but for how long?
Many
are already questioning the practicality of using only those 60 established
lines, and soon the debate over destroying more embryos will return, like a
toothache in a rush of cold air. Somewhere along the line it will have to be
determined whether the “donors” (frozen embryos, like China’s prisoners)
are more valuable to society dead than alive, and the whether the human soul has
an inherent dignity beyond its usefulness—even for the noblest of purposes.
Of
course we care about people suffering with Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s
disease, but embryonic stem cells are only one of several avenues for research.
A case in point is Congressman Ron Lewis’ promotion of research
involving, of all things, tobacco plants, as promising vehicles in non-embryonic
stem cell research. The great thing
about this initiative and many others involving stem cells from sources other
than embryos is that nobody dies, and no one has to make moral judgments about
who is most worthy to live.
The
president’s assertion that science offers us both “great promise and great
peril” illustrates the gravity of this debate, not just for us but for the
generations that follow. Our
children will bear the consequences for the honor or guilt of our decisions.
And let us not forget that honor and guilt are real and immediate.
Consider Dr. Wang, a product of Communist atheistic China, a man one
would expect to be free of enigmatic questions of soul.
Still he lamented, “Whatever impact I have made in the lives of burn
victims and transplant patients does not excuse the unethical and immoral manner
of extracting organs.”
Do
you wonder what he’d say about embryonic stem cell research?
Crystal
Chapman is policy analyst with The Family Foundation of Kentucky, a nonprofit
educational organization focusing on public policy issues affecting families.