Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
In this view, embryos represent the possibility of a new human life, and so destroying an embryo destroys that possibility. Many opponents of Castle-DeGette make this point. "The embryos that were you and me were allowed to grow to become Congressmen, Congresswomen, police officers, factory workers, soldiers, government employees, lawyers, doctors, scientists," Bart Stupak, a Michigan Democrat, said during the debate in the House. "We were all embryos at one time. We were all allowed to grow."
Does Bush's position on stem cell research reflect strongly held personal beliefs?
Well, we have no way of knowing what Bush actually believes. It certainly is possible that he really thinks of embryos as deserving the same moral consideration as the rest of us.
The problem, though, is that Bush's position is intellectually and morally inconsistent. If Bush really thinks embryos are human beings, you'd think he would insist on protecting them in all circumstances. But he's not. And it would appear that the reason he's not is because if he did, the public wouldn't stand for it and he and the GOP would pay a steep political price.
What do you mean?
Take IVF medicine. Bush's belief that embryos are human beings stands in direct opposition to the way fertility medicine is currently practiced in the United States. IVF clinics treat embryos as "special tissues deserving of special respect," but not as human beings, says Sean Tipton, a spokesman for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, which represents the nation's fertility clinics. After all, Tipton notes, "you don't put human beings in freezers."
If we were to treat embryos as human beings, IVF practice would need to be significantly altered. You would want to create only as many embryos as you were going to implant, and you'd never freeze them, and never discard them. Such restrictions would make IVF medicine more arduous for women, more expensive, and would likely reduce its rate of success. "The entire endeavor would be overall less effective," says Eleanor Nicoll, also of ASRM.
But Bush is not proposing such restrictions, is he?
No, he's not. And that's the point. If Bush really thinks that embryos are people, he'd want to make sure that IVF clinics, which treat embryos as tissues, would change their ways in order to reduce their dependence on creating, freezing and discarding extra embryos. But he's proposed no such rules, and has had generally positive words for the practice of IVF medicine. The babies at his press event the other day were, after all, conceived through IVF.
So does anyone on the right want to outlaw IVF medicine due to the way it treats embryos?
Not exactly. But there are some religious conservatives who do wish that the president and other Republicans would pursue stricter regulation of IVF clinics. Carrie Gordon Earll, the senior analyst for bioethics at James Dobson's Focus on the Family ministry, describes her group's position on fertility treatment this way: "IVF can be used by married couples responsibly, if they only create embryos that will be implanted. Ideally the parents should go back for further pregnancy attempts and make every effort to implant frozen embryos." The other option, Earll says, is "adoption" -- if IVF patients decide that they don't want to implant frozen embryos, they should donate them to another couple. "There isn't any reason," Earll says, "why we can't have life-affirming response to all of these questions." We shouldn't ever have to throw away embryos or use them for research, she says.
Earll hopes lawmakers will pass such regulations on IVF medicine, but she understands that they're unlikely to do so. In the United States, IVF medicine is popular and uncontroversial, and has led so far to more than 250,000 births. Going after fertility treatments wouldn't appear to be a very good move for the "culture-of-life" Republican party.
"Ideally we don't want to see any embryos destroyed," Earll says. "But ideally I think we should have world peace. Just because you see a problem doesn't mean there's the political ability to change it."
So do you think that Bush actually realizes that IVF medicine is "killing" embryos, but he's not criticizing the practice because of politics? Or does he just not understand that IVF medicine leads to discarded embryos?
Well, we don't really know what Bush thinks about IVF. Bush dodged the question at a recent press conference. But as far as we can tell he's never once criticized IVF clinics for their routine practices of freezing and destroying embryos, practices he'd have to conclude are immoral, and which the right wants him to speak out against. So it would appear, then, that in the case of IVF medicine, Bush is putting politics -- i.e., the popularity of IVF -- above his supposed moral belief that embryos are inviolable.
And Matthew Yglesias of the American Prospect points out another area where Bush puts politics over embryos: Bush doesn't support a ban on embryo destruction in the United States. He only opposes federal funding of embryo destruction, and of research on stem cells derived from those embryos. But in most U.S. states anyone with state or private money is free to destroy an embryo and work on stem cells from that embryo, and Bush is OK with that. He knows embryos are being killed, and that stem cells from those embryos are being experimented upon, but he doesn't mind, because the government's not paying.
Of course, it would be politically costly for the president to advocate a total ban on stem cell research. But again, that's the point. If you believed that embryos are human beings, and if you believed that human beings were being killed, you would move to protect them -- or at least speak out in their favor -- even if there's a political cost to it. Bush hasn't done that, and he won't advocate banning embryo destruction, or all embryonic stem cell research. Indeed, at the Republican convention last year, when a few religious conservatives attempted to insert a plank in the party platform calling for a ban on all embryonic stem cell research, leading Republicans, on the White House's authority, fought the measure, and it lost by a close vote. Bush says he believes that embryos are people, but if protecting them meant losing the presidency, he was willing to let them die.
It sounds like you're suggesting that Bush doesn't really believe embryos are people?
Again, there's no way to know what he thinks. But the point is that his actions don't reflect this belief. Except in the single case of his opposition to stem cell research, Bush acts as if there are in fact differences between people and embryos, and that some things are more important than embryos -- including politics.
And that's not really a bad thing. Arthur Caplan, the director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics, points out that treating embryos as human beings in public policy matters would lead to outcomes that border on the absurd. If you treat embryos as "real human lives," not only would you have to ban IVF and stem cell research, "but you'd also have to ban sex," Caplan says. That's because normal unprotected sex frequently leads to pregnancies that never progress beyond the first few days after conception. Sex leads to embryos, and embryos are lost all the time -- according to studies cited by the president's bioethics council, between 22 and 40 percent of all fertilized embryos are lost before fertilization even becomes clinically detectable.
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