Even More on IVF and ESC Research
I originally posted this as a comment in an earlier thread, but felt it was an important enough point to reiterate here, on the front page:
Whether or not we should be doing research on these embryos is at worst a secondary moral concern. The primary concern is the creation of doomed excess embryos in the first place, and that lies entirely with IVF. Yet stem cell research gets all the headlines, and nobody prominently complains about IVF.ESC research could be forever banned today, and this wouldn’t save the life of a single, solitary embryo. Not one. So why all the hoopla about the research, and none about the root problem, IVF? This is what I’ve been arguing all along (dating back to when Joe first started commenting on it.
So wouldn’t it make much more sense to focus all the attention on the root problem? Wouldn’t it make more sense to push for the reform or banning of IVF? If the moral issue were all that was at stake here, of course it would.
But you see, there’s more to it than that. Any politician coming out publicly against fertility services (like IVF) is committing political suicide. They realize that their position is inconsistent, but they can’t politically afford to take a consistent one (and frankly, I don’t think they even want to), so they have to make excuses and grandstand with snowflakes, etc.
Now I don’t think that most people have some deep, dark motive here, or are even being intentionally duplicitous. However, it seems to me that for most who oppose ESC research, something feels “wrong” about destroying embryos for research, but at the same time, they’re okay with destroying some in an effort to get pregnant. They must have the impression, then, that the moral failing lies somewhere other than with the destruction of the embryos, even if they can’t see this or won’t admit it.
That’s why it’s so important to point out these discrepancies and make people think about them, and attempt to explain them. When they see that embryo destruction is dependent not upon ESC research, but on in-vitro fertilization, they’ll have to reconsider their position.
Let’s be honest, there is one reason the pro-lifers do not make the big stink about IVF like they do about stem cell research and that’s because they’ve gained a lot of ground and anti-abortion support from women dealing with fertility issues who are resentful of women willing to through away what they so badly want. Complaining about the evils of IVF would create a distance between their newfound allies, and they don’t want to do that until they’ve passed the laws they want passed. Remember this is the same group of people that banned research on tissue from aborted fetuses back in the late 80s-early 90s (and there nothing was being killed for that research at all).