Opinion, Volume 8 number 9, September 2006, by Neal Matson
The Missionary Position: On Stem Cell Research
Recently, two related issues have been in the news: stem cell research and the approval of Plan B contraception.
The first presidential veto in over five years was used to appease the religious right and prevent the use of any of the over 400,000 leftover frozen embryos for stem cell research. The public overwhelmingly supports using stem cells to find cures for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, heart disease, paralysis, diabetes, cancer, etc.
The second item, Plan B contraception, is still strongly opposed by fundamentalists for the very same reason they oppose stem cell research—because they believe that life begins at conception. It's just that simple, for them. Let us examine this position.
Does life "begin" at all? Biological life is more of a continuum. Eggs and sperm are not "dead" as commonly understood. Just watch the Simpsons episode illustrating Bart's conception and see all the tiny Homer-headed sperm swimming and bumping into each other. At the very least, sperm cells and eggs seem to have a kind of "half-life." Any honest fundamentalist who takes the Bible literally, extrapolates upon it, and wants to play the safest card in the game of when life begins should endorse the position of life before conception.
In fact, in Hebrews 7:10 we learn that great grandson Levi "was still in the body of his ancestor," great grandfather Abraham. Levi was certainly "alive" enough to be given a name. We can logically conclude that "life" is in the male chromosome. This could result in recreational Y-chromosome harvesting being prosecuted as mass murder and possibly leading to mandatory preemptive vasectomies for all males. Perhaps noncompliant men would be hunted down by religious gangs and expeditiously castrated. Such things could be the future fruit of American fundamentalism.
But seriously, the current conservative claim that life begins at conception has no basis in scripture. There are references to individuals alive in the womb, but no indications that their lives began at conception. This notion is a brand new doctrine promoted by the likes of James Dobson (one of the prime movers behind our present socio-religious civil war) who has said that "The matter…will never be settled by logic and argumentation. I am…committed to my views…and nothing will dislodge [me] from [my] deeply held position." Apparently not even God.
God said, "the life...is in the blood" (Leviticus 17:11) and again, "the blood is the life" (Deuteronomy 12:23). The essence of Christianity is Christ's blood shed for our eternal life. Blood and life are intimately and inextricably linked in the Bible. No blood, no life, quite simple. So, reinforced by modern medicine which tells us that the first primitive blood and circulation in the fetus develop on or about the fifteenth day, we now have a scripturally based and scientifically defensible definition of when life actually begins—fifteen days after conception.
This definition allows for the extraction of stem cells from medically bloodless and Biblically nonliving blastocysts at the time, four to seven days, when they offer the highest potential for the development of curative treatments. Jesus would surely approve and encourage this new approach toward alleviating suffering.
Singapore already has. This tiny country has invested $8.2 billion in biomedical R&D and is attracting the world's top scientists because it funds research using stem cells from blastocysts up to fourteen days old.
The fifteen-day definition will also allow a woman to use Plan B without accepting the right-wing's guilt trip of "murdering her baby." She will not even know if an egg had fertilized in the first place.
Finally, hope sprang anew with the recent announcement that researchers were able to remove one stem cell from a blastocyst without any apparent damage to the blastocyst. This should end the argument over stem cells, but I'm not holding my breath. The initial reaction from the fetus-rights folks is that they are still against it even though no "life" is compromised. "Thou shalt not play God,” they say, for lack of any argument or directives from their leaders. "Thou shalt think for yourself,” I say.
That's this missionary's position and I'm sticking to it. | ||
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