A "No-Brainer" Indeed

Editor's note. Today is my oldest daughter's birthday. Happy Birthday, Emily! Please send any thoughts you have on this column to daveandrusko@hotmail.com.

The longer I'm in this long-term struggle, the more I am amazed that people can come to the most awful conclusions after making important, indeed, incontrovertible points along the way. I shouldn't be, but I am. As one example, I offer author William Saletan, who writes the "Human Nature" column for Slate magazine.

In last Sunday's New York Times Saletan reviewed a book which I have not read--"A Defense of Human Life"-- written by two gentlemen whose reputations I know and respect--Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen.

Let's first take what Saletan gets right. It's the opening sentence of his review. "Thirty-five years after Roe v. Wade, the pro-life movement faces a new challenge: biotechnology," a challenge, he suggests, that "is arguably more insidious than abortion."

Abortions are gruesome and "arous[e] revulsion and political opposition," he writes. By contrast, "Conventional stem-cell harvesting is quieter but bolder. It's deliberate and industrial, not accidental and personal. In combination with cloning, it entails the mass production, exploitation and destruction of human embryos. Yet its victims don't look human. You can't protest outside a fertility clinic waving a picture of a blastocyst. You have to explain what it is and why people should care about it."

And Saletan is also correct when he writes that this is the task undertaken by George and Tollefsen. (And by you and me!)

He is wrong about just about everything else. A point-by-point rebuttal would be almost as long as "A Defense of Human Life" (242 pages). So let be just touch on two of his numerous curious conclusions.

#1. It begins with Saletan's second sentence.

"The first human biotech issue, embryonic stem-cell research, looks like an easy call. Stem cells could save millions of lives. And the entity we currently sacrifice to get them -- a sacrifice that may soon be unnecessary -- is a tiny, undeveloped ball of cells. The question, like the embryo, seems a no-brainer."

I had to read this a couple of time--"a sacrifice that may soon be unnecessary"-- just to make sure my first impression was accurate: that he had left intact the absurdly inflated assertion about saving lives using stem cells harvested from human embryos. It actually gets worse on a second and third reading.

Saletan is telling us (a) even if there were stem cells that come from a host of morally acceptable sources of stem cells, stem cells from human embryos "could save millions of lives"; and (b) since all we're talking about is sacrificing a "tiny, undeveloped ball of [embryonic stem] cells," it's a "no-brainer."

The truth is that the embryonic stem cell/cloning lobby brazenly insists on the continued need for lethally culling stem cells from human embryos for reasons that have precious little to do with curing diseases. Virtually all the evidence points to a slew of difficulties inherent in using embryonic stem cells; and the greater likelihood of success using any of a flock of alternatives, such as resetting the clock on a skin cell which, developmentally, sends it back in time.

And if by "no-brainer" Saletan were to mean that many people's first instinct is utilitarian unless they are told what values and principles are being sacrificed, he's probably correct. Americans are famous for embracing "what works." But that, of course, isn't what Saletan means.

#2. The other example I'd offer is a paragraph that captures a lot of the subtext and is breathtaking in its confusion.

"The authors," Saletan observes, "think this unfolding trajectory justifies an equation of embryos with adults. 'The proper way to identify the nature of an organism,' they write, is 'to look at it through time.' Each of us 'comes into existence as a single-celled human organism and develops, if all goes well, into adulthood.' But in the big picture, the embryo isn't a future adult. It is, as the authors acknowledge, a future corpse. And the program is far bigger. It doesn't end at death, because it doesn't run on one body. It runs on the network of humanity. In fact, it runs on the entire Internet of evolving species."

But what on earth (or beyond) does this mean? If we die--pretty much S.O.P.--that means the human embryo wasn't ever a future adult? Or, if it was, that it didn't matter? Or that our individuality is an illusion, a reflection of our inability to see that we are all part of some collective "Over-Soul" evolutionarily chugging along its merry way?

Saletan habitually wants to eat his cake and have it too. His last paragraph illustrates this in spades:

"None of these confounding discoveries destroy the book's essential and timely message. Of all the lines we could draw in human development to mark the onset of moral worth, conception is the brightest. But that line is no more absolute in ethics than in science. We should never create or destroy embryos lightly. We owe them our respect. We just don't owe them the same respect we owe one another."

What an all-purpose escape clause:  create/destroy/manipulate human life, just don't do so "lightly"--and don't forget to show "respect." It's at times like this that you wonder whether these people read, let alone reflect on, what they write.

Please send your comments to Dave Andrusko at daveandrusko@hotmail.com.