Embryonic Stem Cell Research Now Characterized with Eugenics

Social Conservatives sometimes really irritate me. Well, more often than not. This article by Terence Jeffrey is a perfect example. It's especially loathsome for its use of comparisons of stem cell research to the activities of the Nazis under Mengele and Brandt.

Bush said he wanted "to explore the promise and potential of stem cell research without crossing a fundamental moral line by providing taxpayer funding that would sanction or encourage further destruction of human embryos that have at least the potential for life."

The next year, announcing his support for banning all human cloning (including cloning embryos to kill them for their stem cells), Bush crystallized the issue: "Research cloning would contradict the most fundamental principle of medical ethics: that no human life should be exploited for the benefit of another."

Bush was echoing a principle enunciated by the U.S. judges who tried Nazi doctors at Nuremburg after World War II.

In "The Nazi Doctors -- Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide," author Robert J. Lifton chronicled how Hitler seduced physicians into overseeing mass murder. It started when Hitler directed his own doctor, Karl Brandt, to make certain a single deformed infant was "euthanized." From there, it escalated to Dr. Josef Mengele monitoring the arriving trains at Auschwitz to choose which prisoners to send directly to the gas chambers, which to retain as workers, and which to send to his laboratory for experimentation and dissection.

"It seemed easier -- perhaps more 'natural' and at least less 'unnatural' -- to begin with the very young: first, newborns; then, children up to 3 and 4; then, older ones," wrote Lifton, summarizing Germany's initial steps toward medicalized killing.

Where to start. Well maybe we could look at the left over and abandoned embryos from fertility clinics. How is this like eugenics or Mengele's experiments? Well, because the extreme social conservatives rant that they are life, period, no argument. Of course, that is the simplistic argument. In fact they aren't viable life. They don't exist in a self sustainable manner, unlike those killed by Brandt or Mengele. They also have no path to becoming viable. If there is such a demand for these frozen cell masses, why are there so many sitting in storage? If they are so highly valued, why hasn't the social conservatives moved to force them to come to fruition? Because they can't, or don't want to.

And don't forget that you can't call the conservatives Nazis, but that doesn't apparently apply when making an argument that stretches the facts to the breaking point.

This obviously isn't an argument that will move stem cell research forward. That should be the primary focus in this debate. It would make more sense to move forward with as many research paths as possible, but the far right seems to be doing their best to just block any discussion. Funny, that's the same methodology that the far left seem to think is a reasonable solution.