Current Events: Sticky Stem-Cells

This Stem-cell business is not as simple as I first perceived. The wording of the bill passed by the House was that researchers could use stem-cells from fertility clinics that "would otherwise be discarded." So it's not that the bill provides for making babies, experimenting on them to find cures for diseases, and then killing the babies they don't use.

It's the fertility clinics that are already making the babies (I think they combine sperm and egg outside the womb for parents who can't have kids the, uh, normal way), and they just "discard" the ones they don't use (what a callous word for "murder"), so the researchers figure, hey, you're not using them anyway, let us use them to find cures for diseases.

From a purely practical level, this bill makes a lot of sense. Might as well put the useless babies to good use, instead of throwing them out with the trash, right? This bill by itself is not the root of the issue. The fundamental problem is the fertility clinics that want to "discard" the babies they don't need.

So, the question is not, "Shoulder we murder babies or not?" The question is, "Is it better to mess with babies that are going to die otherwise, or just let them die?" What's the lesser of two evils?

I don't know hardly anything about fertility clinics, but the root of the problem seems to be they create babies they don't have womb for, and then there's no place to put them. Let them die? Use them for research? What a bothersome, horrible situation...

Edmond the Hun

P.S. I've used the term "babies" instead of "embryoes" because it's essentially the same thing, but because our society has ascribed more worth to the former term, using it instead of the latter makes it more obvious that discarding is actually murder, a fact that everyone seems to be ignoring.