Morality

[thepeopleseason]

President Bush argues that the most-recently-vetoed bill expanding funding for embryonic stem cell research "crosses a moral boundary that our decent society needs to respect."

Comments

[ellenore.livejournal.com]

Yup, pretty much. American embryos > Iraqi detainees

[thepeopleseason.livejournal.com]

The double-standard is worse than that:

So I ask, if using discarded embryos to extract stem cells is murder, isn't it then immoral to allow federal research on existing lines of embryonic stem cells as the current administration's policy permits? Murder is murder, Mr. President.

And isn't it immoral to allow privately funded embryonic research to continue? Now again, in this country, as we heard many times on the floor here in the last couple days of the debate, privately funded embryonic stem cell research goes on in the United States. But according to the President, this is murder. And if it's really murder...why isn't the President using his authority, his moral authority, to shut down all the in-vitro fertilization clinics in America? By his definition of murder, these clinics are institutions of mass murder.

Virtually everytime a couple goes to a fertility clinic, leftover embryos are created...if that's murder, how can the President permit it to continue? Where's his outrage at the IVF clinics in this country? Why isn't he up here proposing legislation to shut down in-vitro fertilization in this country? Make it a crime, a federal crime, to conduct in-vitro fertilization? In the President's narrow, moral universe, it seems to be just fine to destroy embryos, to throw them away, as the by-product of producing babies through IVF, but it's murder to use the embryos to conduct life saving research. Someone please explain the logic of that to me.

And why isn't the President prosecuting the many thousands of American men and women who use these IVF clinics? If their attempts to have children results in leftover embryos and these embryos eventually get discarded, aren't they complicit in murder? Under the President's narrow, moral logic, and I'd hate to call it logic, the President's narrow, moral view, any man or woman who allows their embryo to be discarded, something that happens everyday, is authorizing murder. Why is the President standing idly by? Why isn't he putting all these men and women in jail?

-- Iowa Senator Tom Harkin