Year Abortions
1973 744,600
1974 898,600
1975 1,034,200
1976 1,179,300
1977 1,316,700
1978 1,409,600

On July 25, 1978, Louise Joy Brown, the world’s first successful “test-tube” baby was born in Great Britain.

To address the hypocrisy claims: It is not being a hypocrite to not tilt at a windmill. Since there is no political momentum to ban IVF, it is pointless to refuse to ban pubilc funding of ESCR until political moment builds to ban IVF. Especially because such political momentum isn’t even on the radar.

Possible Answer: Almost all the stem cells for research come from the zygotes produced in “fertility clinics.” Whenever a rich, privileged woman and her husband, hell-bent and determined not to adopt, but to have something with their own DNA in it, pay $10-20,000.OO to some medical moral idiot for the production of 20-40 zygotes in a petri dish, ONLY ONE IS CHOSEN FOR “IMPLANTATION.”

Question: Where do the other zygotes go?

Possible–no, LIKELY–Answer: To the “reserch labs.” SOLD to them, I might add.

Question: Have you ever heard the Catholic Church offer to “funeralize” all those zygotes–or even the embryos, after they been “implanted”?

Answer: Are you kidding? Spend money on THAT?

Question: Why does the “moral responsibility” for stem-cell research always fall upon politicians and legislators, in the sermonizing of Holy Mother Church in America?

Answer: They’re a much easier target than the depraved–and often CATHOLIC–American upper middle classes and their medical friends. Who wants to hear a sermon in church about the moral responsibility to adopt and forsake the “wonders of medical science” in the interest of preserving the “whole cloth” of life?

Until the Catholic Church targets the real source of this moral degeneracy, which is the pagan quest by this culture to achieve immortality through the prolongation of life or the replication of one’s genes–NO MATTER WHAT THE COST–I believe I’ll treat all this palaver about “stem cell research” as the hypocrisy it is.

But the same principles underlie Catholic opposition to both abortion and stem-cell research. Are pro-life Catholics willing to make a political compromise on abortion? I don’t think so. But I don’t recall a firestorm over Bush’s stem-cell compromise.

Perhaps the reason is, as Michael Sandel says in his book The Case Against Perfection, that people don’t believe fertilized eggs and very early embryos are really human beings. Some people claim to believe it, but if they really did, they would be trying to shut down fertility clinics with the same fervor as they are trying to criminalize abortion.

I remember someone saying that Bush’s compromise on stem-cell research could be regarded as Solomonic if Solomon had actually cut the baby in half.

Michael Sandel, has pointed out how strange it is to deem something morally offensive and deny it public funding while letting it continue in the private sector:

A further reason to be skeptical of the notion that blastocysts are persons is to notice that many who invoke it do not embrace its full implications. President Bush is a case in point. In 2001, he announced a policy that restricted federal funding to already existing stem cell lines, so that no taxpayer funds would encourage or support the destruction of embryos. And in 2006, he vetoed a bill that would have funded new embryonic stem cell research, saying that he did not want to support “the taking of innocent human life.”

But it is a striking feature of the president’s position that, while restricting the funding of embryonic stem cell research, he has made no effort to ban it. To adapt a slogan from the Clinton administration, the Bush policy might be summarized as “don’t fund, don’t ban.” But this policy is at odds with the notion that embryos are human beings.

If harvesting stem cells from a blastocyst were truly on a par with harvesting organs from a baby, then the morally responsible policy would be to ban it, not merely deny it federal funding. If some doctors made a practice of killing children to get organs for transplantation, no one would take the position that the infanticide should be ineligible for federal funding but allowed to continue in the private sector. In fact, if we were persuaded that embryonic stem cell research were tantamount to infanticide, we would not only ban it but treat it as a grisly form of murder and subject scientists who performed it to criminal punishment.

There are a number of moral issues, here, of course. How widespread is the privately-funded destruction of embryos? As the UCSSB notes: “the fact that the embryos were destroyed with private funds does not solve the moral problem.” Moreover: “research on cell lines already established by destroying human embryos does not avoid moral complicity in such destruction.”

And what about thw wanton destruction of embryos in fertility clinics? Here’s Michael Kinsley:

“if embryos are human beings, the routine practices of fertility clinics are far worse—both in numbers and in criminal intent—than stem-cell research. And yet no one objects, or objects very loudly. President Bush actually praised the work of fertility clinics in his first speech announcing restrictions on stem cells.”