ShareThisWhen septuplets were born to a Muslim couple in the nation's capital, the medical team that delivered the babies advised aborting the weaker siblings to give the stronger ones a better chance at life. Mother and father refused on religious grounds, insisting that since God is the creator, no human has the right to destroy innocent life.
It is a simplistic argument, acknowledged more in theory than in practice since Roe v. Wade. Sex remains mostly in the bedroom, but reproduction has long since shifted to the laboratory. Ever since it became possible to fertilize an ovum with sperm in a laboratory dish, there has been an explosion in the number of embryos that will never be allowed to develop naturally into human beings. When prospective parents go to a fertility clinic, they typically seek to produce just one child, but the clinic fertilizes as many eggs as possible. Only the most promising are implanted in the mother; the rest are frozen or destroyed.
There are now more than 100,000 frozen human embryos in the United States. The government resists giving tax dollars to scientists who want to extract stem cells from the tiny 4- to 7-day-old potential humans, thus killing them. But fashions are shifting.
Not everyone who opposes aborting fetuses objects to destroying embryos for their stem cells. The reason is this: many abortions are carried out for no loftier motive than the pregnant woman's convenience. But stem cells from embryos have the potential to develop into different kinds of body tissue to cure an array of diseases and replace dysfunctional organs.
So they argue for an exception to the categorical imperative that human life be treated as an end and not a means. The destruction of a potential human being offers the opportunity to enhance or extend the life of an existing human being. Moreover, they argue, the frozen embryos serve no practical purpose because they have been abandoned by their parents.
A further argument for government intervention in stem-cell research is to guard against excesses. And excesses there are. The disfigured "Elephant Man" in medical history was fully human. But in 1998 scientists successfully implanted a human nucleus in the egg of a cow, creating a cow-human embryo. Physician-columnist Charles Krauthammer warns of the potential to artificially create identical humans or, worse, partial humans, kept artificially alive to be killed later for their body parts.
Anti-abortion advocates -- religious and secular alike -- argue that destroying an embryo for its stem cells reduces the value of a human being to its potential to be harvested for a heart, an arm, or a liver for someone else. It is akin to treating people like junked autos, useful only for spare parts.
Coincidentally, a growing fashion for harried career women who want children of their own without the inconvenience of pregnancy, childbirth and stretch marks is to "rent" the wombs of surrogate mothers. A clinic in California charges $64,000 for the procedure.
(David Yount's latest book is "Celebrating the Single Life: Keys to Successful Living on Your Own" (Praeger). He answers readers at P.O. Box 2758, Woodbridge, VA 22195 and dyount31(at)verizon.net.)
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