fearlesshistory

Is it ethical to freeze a living human being against their will? I mean putting them in suspended animation where they can not grow and can not experience life?

Is it a sin to place six or seven people in a room far too small to hold them, knowing that many of them will die because of lack of nutrition, overcrowding and the stress related to such circumstances?

Much brouhaha is being made over President Obama’s rescinding of the Bush-era restrictions on stem cell research. To many critics, the nub of the problem is that stem cell research destroys a “human life” because it uses cells withdrawn from a fertilized egg and the fertilized egg is thus destroyed. Here’s the problem with these objections;

No equivalent hue and cry is made over fertilization processes. Aside from the approbation directed at Nadya Suleman (mostly because she is single and has no visible means of supporting a family; i.e. a husband), there is never any ire aimed at the irresponsible use of drugs, in vitro fertilization, and other artificial means of forcing a pregnancy onto a woman who - for lack of a better term - “God” has engineered to be “barren.” During the process of artificial insemination - a technique used by the McCaughey family in addition to fertility drugs - eggs are removed from the mother’s ovaries and sperm is “donated” from the father (in a process of self pleasure which many conservative Christians still believe is a sin; strike one!). The different cells are then introduced to each other in a medical setting, not inside the mother’s uterus and literally dozens of cells are fertilized at once (instead of maybe one or two which can occur naturally). A select few (about 6 is the maximum) are the implanted into the mother through the use of medical syringes while the rest are frozen in a liquid oxygen bath.

If these cells are “living beings” and a “human soul” from the instant of conception, do they not have a right to expand, grow, and be born? Evidently it is because millions of fertilized eggs are frozen in clinics across the country.

After the mother and father who have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to experience “God’s” miracle of birth (via science) are happy with their litter of squalling, developmentally-challenged, premature-weight children, what happens to the rest of the fertilized eggs?

They’re destroyed. Yes, they are taken out of their bath and burned in a medical waste disposal facility. They are, to borrow from the warped logic of these alleged protectors of the sanctity of life, “murdered.” But there is no objection over this portion of the process, is there?

So in summation, it’s okay to “waste” and “murder” these fertilized eggs because “God” blesses a married, mentally-unstable couple with the “miracle” of multiple births that are the result of scientific inquiry and thin or nonexistent medical ethics. But the idea that instead of destroying these “lives” needlessly and without gain, that a portion of their body be used to heal the sick and the paralyzed who are already born is a sin.

Hypocrisy (hĭ-pŏḱrĭ-sē):

1. The practice of professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not hold or possess; falseness.
2. An act or instance of such falseness.

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