Word: embryos
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...vote is about providing moral leadership for a watching world," said Wisconsin's James Sensenbrenner. Lawmakers cited everyone from Galileo to the Pope to Nancy Reagan in their arguments over how best to balance protecting human life against relieving human suffering. Supporters of the tight Weldon ban warned of embryo farms and headless humans cloned to harvest their organs. "Human beings should not be cloned to stock a medical junkyard of spare parts for experimentation," declared Tom DeLay. Those favoring Greenwood's more liberal guidelines warned of America becoming a theocracy, where a minority's conviction could block research...
...strict pro-lifers the issue is straightforward: an embryo at any stage of development is a human life, worthy of protection, and any kind of research that entails destroying an embryo to harvest its cells is immoral, no matter how worthy the intent. It involves using people as means; it turns human life into a commodity and fosters a culture of dehumanization that we accept at our peril. "We have just enough time to ensure that we remain the masters of our technology," warned Henry Hyde, "not its products...
...even some pro-life lawmakers don't want fears about cloning to stop other kinds of stem-cell research that do not entail the manufacture of new embryos. Many have been relying on a kind of moral escape hatch: the fact that every year there are tens of thousands of frozen embryos left over from fertility treatments in clinics around the country. National Institutes of Health guidelines say it is O.K. to do research on cells from such embryos, most of which would be destroyed anyway; but it is wrong to create an embryo solely for the purpose of harvesting...
...also about the limits of law. What good is a partial ban on cloning if it cannot be enforced? Once embryos are produced for research and stockpiled in labs, lawmakers warned, it's hard to control how they are used. Even under Greenwood, which would subject private labs to some government oversight, there would be no knowing for certain whether scientists were violating the law against actually implanting a cloned embryo in a surrogate mother. And if someone found out? "No government agency is going to compel a woman to abort the clone," argued University of Chicago medical ethicist Leon...
...capture an embryonic stem cell, scientists must find an embryo, or blastocyst (from umbilical cord tissue, a frozen sample from a fertility clinic, an aborted fetus, or, most controversially, from a cloned specimen) ideally a few days after fertilization. Researchers then extract stem cells from the blastocyst, and, they hope, use those blank slates to create new, potentially curative, cells...