Monday, March 26, 2007

Elizabeth Edwards and Stem Cells

I should start off this post by saying that I am sorry that Mrs. Edwards breast cancer is back and has spread. I do pray for her health. However, being sick does not give one permission to be immoral. The media has given her a free ride because of her illness, but I cannot ignore her inciting murder. I do not really have a problem with her decision to campaign (I have a slight problem at the insinuation that those who do stop normal life to fight cancer are doing something wrong), but I do have a problem with her first speech since the announcement.

Mrs. Edwards does use one interesting argument. The "its inevitable, so let us be the first to do it" argument. She basically tells all of us religious nuts who think children are important that we cannot stop embryos from being murdered so why bother stopping federal dollars from doing the killing. After all how would we feel if Communist China beat us in the whole sale slaughter of our own people for scientific advances or worse yet, what if we lose to France? She misses the point that this is not a race to the moon, but rather a matter of murder. Not to mention the fundamental principle that the government should not raise my taxes or take money from me to murder someone else. That idea is despicable.

Mrs. Edwards main argument appears to be that these are not children because they are unwanted. Thus, to her they are "clumps of cells". This is a ridiculous opinion. The very same argument could be made for any unwanted child of any age and every child who is ever abandoned. All human being are "clumps of cells" and if being wanted is the only thing that makes one a person then why not just pick up homeless guys and do experiments on them? No where has Mrs. Edwards even fairly addressed the concern that life begins at conception regardless of what happens after that point. Instead she appeals to pragmatism. Hundreds of babies are going to be throw out, so let us use them to help the rest of society by killing them for science. That is her argument. No trying to defend the defenseless, no appeal to higher moral law, just a plain old self-centered appeal to get what she needs no matter what the cost.

Would Mrs. Edwards be happy if a cure for her cancer were found in the Nazi concentration camps? If Hitler had dissected the Jews instead of putting them in gas chambers and came up with a cure for cancer, would Mrs. Edwards laud him as a hero, ask for government funding, and use the treatments from such butchery? According to her arguments, I think so.

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