Addendum on ESCR and slippery slopes

Update 2: Link to Saletan’s “Drill Babies, Drill” article corrected.

Update: Hat tip to a friend for reminding me to link to this one (also added to the previous post): Why Embryonic Stem Cells Are Obsolete (U.S. News & World Report)

Following my post on embryonic stem cells and Bill Clinton’s double debacle, a couple of quick follow-ups from recent headlines.

First, this morning The New York Times posted an editorial on “The Rules on Stem Cells” that, as First Things’s Ryan T. Anderson points out, officially endorses cloning “without calling it that.”

Second, on Friday Slate’s William Saletan posted an editorial provocatively titled “Drill Babies, Drill,” subtitled with the unavoidable question, “If harvesting embryos is OK, how about fetuses?” (Hat tips to Dreher and First Things, among others.)

Rider: Don’t miss Krauthammer’s response to Obama’s ESCR speech, linked to previously at the end of my previous post.

9 thoughts on “Addendum on ESCR and slippery slopes”

  2. Thanks for a great blog post.
    Please fix the “Drill, babies, drill” link. It mistakenly goes to NY Times.

  4. The phrase “reproductive cloning” is a redundancy, like “duplicative copying.”
    The phrase “non-reproductive cloning” is an oxymoron.
    The phrase “therapeutic cloning” is politically convenient rhetoric intended to confuse the issue and the voter.

  5. The phrase “reproductive cloning” is a redundancy, like “duplicative copying.”

    The phrase “non-reproductive cloning” is an oxymoron.

    The phrase “therapeutic cloning” is politically convenient rhetoric intended to confuse the issue and the voter.

    Objectively, you’re right, of course, insofar as any clone, even a blastocyst created purely for spare parts, is a human being and thus reproduction has occurred.
    At the same time, some might feel that in a subjective but real way, cloning a human being for the purposes of bringing it to childbirth seems to pose a different set of difficulties, just as post-birth infanticide seems to pose additional subjective difficulties compared to a morning-after chemical abortion. (The bishops have acknowledged this subjective distinction by describing partial-birth abortion as closer to infanticide than abortion.)
    The difference, I think, may be that where development has been allowed to proceed, we are confronted with, not just a human being, but a human being capable of subjectively experiencing its own victimization. Both abortion and cloning are always grave violations of the dignity of a human person, but the victim of very early chemical abortion or the blastocyst destroyed in the petri dish have no experience of their victimhood. By contrast, the physical pain apparently experienced by the more developed fetus or the born infant when dissected or burned, the emotional truma faced by the cloned person in coming to understand how it has been commodified, may be felt to add to the objective wrong.
    However, there is an important disanalogy here as well. Late-term abortion and infanticide both include the same objective evil as very early abortion, plus additional evils. By contrast, “reproductive cloning,” i.e., cloning for the purposes of bringing a life to birth, does not include all the same evils as “therapeutic cloning.” Both are affronts to the dignity of the person, but therapeutic cloning murders a person and reproductive cloning does not.
    Thus, while the subjectivity of the cloned baby/child/adult appeals to our emotions as an additional affront, at least that clone has been allowed to live. So it’s hard to say that “reproductive cloning” is “worse” than “therapeutic cloning,” in the same way that infanticide can be considered “worse” than very early abortion. A case could be made that as regards cloning the reverse is true: Having made a clone, it is worse to kill it than to let it live. It’s messy.

  6. The left’s hatred of the unborn knows no bounds. Even though ESCR is morally objectionable, not necessary, and just been made obsolete on another breakthrough – the ability to make Adult Stem Cells revert to embryonic stage. But nope. They must continue to kill the unborn in the name of Science. Dr. Mengele would be proud.

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