The Stem Cell Debate for Dummies

This Salon piece by Farhad Manjoo on the stem cell debate, and specifically on how Bush's stance on it is pretty much definitionally hypocritical, is a great primer on the subject, that also, given that this is Salon after all, does a relatively good job of representing the right's point of view as well.

The point Manjoo makes that resonates the most with me is the inherent double standard that arises when one tries to define an embryo as a life just as deserving of protection as a newborn baby's. For all of the talk about embryos being lives and deserving protection from the far right, there is no talk whatsoever about the horror, the holocaust, of all of the naturally occurring embryo deaths that happen literally millions of times a year, when women become pregnant and the embryo simply fails to attach. In the lion's share of these cases, the women never even know they were, briefly, pregnant at all. To be coherent intellectually, shouldn't those who advocate for embryos as absolutely equal to real, full, humans also be advocating, just as hard as they do against things like stem-cell research and in-vitro fertilization, for research into preventing these naturally occurring miscarriages? Just asking.

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