Stem cells and Frist’s inconsistency

  • Am I a dunce for think­ing that the ques­tion of whether or not to explore stem cell research is a fore­gone con­clu­sion if you’re pro-life?

    Appar­ently so, because House Major­ity Leader Bill Frist is pro-life, and he’s made news today by com­ing out in favor of stem cell research. This NYTimes story cov­ers it along with all the usual back­ground and analy­sis. But it’s not so much the polit­i­cal impact of this (which the MSM can be counted upon to exag­ger­ate) that dis­turbs me, but the inco­her­ent logic expressed by this quote:

    “I am pro-life,” Mr. Frist says in the speech, argu­ing that he can rec­on­cile his sup­port for the sci­ence with his own Chris­t­ian faith. “I believe human life begins at conception.”

    But at the same time, he says, “I also believe that embry­onic stem cell research should be encour­aged and supported.”

    So he believes that embryos are not tis­sue but ensouled human beings. And he believes that research that har­vests parts from those humans in order to inves­ti­gate the poten­tial ben­e­fit to other humans not only is per­miss­able but “should be encouraged.”

    I don’t even know where to go from there. I infer that the idea is that the poten­tial ben­e­fit ren­ders the nec­es­sary sac­ri­fice of human life incon­se­quen­tial. Or per­haps that human life should occa­sion­ally take a back seat to the qual­ity of human life. I gather that no one wants to be the one to tell Alzheimer patients, para­plegics, dia­bet­ics and oth­ers that this research is morally unten­able and that this nation under God has never been com­fort­able with the view that cer­tain lives are worth more than cer­tain other lives.

    The NYTimes didn’t call Frist on this, of course. I’m sure they’re just pleased that one of the bad guys is finally speak­ing some sense and were all too happy to give him a pass. And I’m afraid that there are many other tender-hearted peo­ple who should know bet­ter who will begin to feel that stem cell research is just too good a thing to stand in the way of on the strength of the usual argu­ments against abortion.

    I hate what’s hap­pen­ing to the dia­logue on life and death issues in this coun­try. Even the pro-life crowd is begin­ning to get swayed by this amor­phous “qual­ity of life” rhetoric that seems to get used more and more often to jus­tify tak­ing life away alto­gether, as if you can make mul­ti­ple deals with the Devil and never expect him to col­lect with interest.

    Lord, have mercy on us.


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    July 29th, 2005 | Grace | 4 Comments |

4 Responses and Counting...

  • Jan Bear 07.29.2005

    I don’t know what Frist was talk­ing about exactly, and I don’t expect the Times to get these details cor­rect when it insti­tu­tion­ally sneers on our qualms about exper­i­ment­ing on live human beings, but —

    There have been some devel­op­ments in the process of find­ing pluripo­tent stem cells that Frist may have been refer­ring to. As pluripo­tent cells, they are essen­tially the same as embry­onic stem cells, but because they use an unfer­til­ized egg and an adult nucleus, the cell goes on to cel­lu­lar divi­sion but not inde­pen­dent life, and no actual embryos are killed.

    Again, I don’t know that that’s what Frist had in mind, but I think we should hear him out before declar­ing him departed from the pro-life ranks.

  • Grace

    You make a good point, so I went and found the tran­script of the entire speech — http://frist.senate.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Spee…

    I can’t find any­thing to indi­cate he means any­thing dif­fer­ent than any­one else when he says ‘stem cell research.’ He does say that he pro­poses leg­is­la­tion that allows research only on the left­over blas­to­cysts of cou­ple seek­ing fer­til­ity treat­ment. If I thought there was any way to actu­ally enforce that exactly as he says it, it’d be one thing. But there isn’t. I think you’d just have a rush of cou­ple who sud­denly “needed” fer­til­ity ther­apy. And if researchers came back after a year or two of this and com­plained that they needed more inven­tory (and Frist men­tions that of the 22 stem cell lines that were approved in 2001, prob­lems have appeared so they need more now) , do we really think we would hold the line, since we’d already erased and redrawn it once?

    Any­way, apart from tick­ing off pro-life con­ser­v­a­tives and giv­ing the main­stream media a chance to hint that Bush is los­ing sup­port, I don’t know that this speech accom­plished much, so it prob­a­bly doesn’t matter.

  • Jan Bear

    You’re right and I was wrong. I posted a full retrac­tion (and then some) today.

    Thanks for the speech link.

  • Grace

    Boy and you made some *great* points to boot! Excel­lent blog.

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