I've had an essay slowly brewing in my head for a while, and I was reminded of it this week when President Bush vetoed the stem cell bill and then held a nauseating ceremony about it, featuring a bunch of "snowflake children" and their "adoptive" parents. "This bill would support the taking of innocent human life," declared the Dubya. (Uh, ya think maybe some of the people who've died in Iraq lately might be innocent?)
O.K., then. First of all, Dubya may not be so familiar with the poor success rate of implanted blastocysts. I wasn't either, but this blogger is, and she helpfully does the math, and between the fact that frozen doesn't take as well as fresh, and various other factors, "you'll be lucky to end up with even half a kid."
Secondly, I'm sure those children are terribly precious little moppets (oh, is that an attack of nausea coming on? Well, I am pregnant! Bring me a bucket!) but... well, they're here now. They look like they have lots more cells than an 8-celled blastocyst. Look, what I'm trying to say is, I don't think blastocysts are children. So when Bush says stuff like this:
“Each of these human embryos is a unique human life with inherent dignity and matchless value,” Mr. Bush said. Looking at the children around him, he said to loud applause, “These boys and girls are not spare parts.”
He's being emotional manipulative and full of shit. OF COURSE THE CHILDREN AREN'T SPARE PARTS. THEY'RE CHILDREN. What does that have to do with anything?
Meanwhile, as we keep hearing, blastocysts get discarded by fertility clinics all the time. They're never going to become "unique human" lives, their "inherent dignity and matchless value" is lost because they can't be used for research that could end up saving the lives of countless children (and adults, though nobody seems to care about that.)
Sure, treatments may not come soon, but this woman makes a convincing case that her son died as a result of these kinds of bans.
From the moment of Henry's diagnosis, my husband and I believed that if we made every call, pulled every string and pushed love and science to their outer limits, Henry would escape his fate. We searched for someone in the medical world who, like us, was unwilling to accept Henry's death sentence without a fight.Our search led us to Mark Hughes, then chief of reproductive and prenatal genetics at the National Institutes of Health. He had figured out a way to combine in vitro fertilization with genetic testing before an embryo is implanted. This procedure, preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), involves extracting and testing a single cell from an eight-cell embryo. The results could allow us to know at the moment of conception that our next baby would avoid FA and be an ideal stem cell donor for Henry.
By collecting this healthy baby's umbilical cord blood -- which is typically discarded -- at birth and transplanting the stem cells into Henry, we could save him. Hughes had used PGD to screen embryos for fatal childhood diseases such as cystic fibrosis. But neither he nor anyone else had ever used PGD to save the life of a child already born.
When we began quietly pursuing PGD a decade ago, it was not on the national news or featured in fertility clinic advertisements. It was somewhere between a hope and a dream shared by a small group of doctors and families. But on Jan. 9, 1997, an article in The Washington Post reported that Hughes was violating a two-year-old federal ban on human embryo research with his work on PGD.
Under the ban, Hughes was barred from performing that work as part of his position at NIH. Refusing to abandon his research or the families who were depending on it, he set up a lab as part of an in vitro fertility program at a private hospital across the street in Bethesda. But he was considered in violation of the federal law because his work at the hospital employed NIH research fellows and used NIH equipment -- a refrigerator.
So living children get to die of diseases that can't be researched properly, or they're dragged onto a stage for a cynical exercise to showcase the president's reverence for the "culture of life."
Excuse me, I'm feeling nauseous again for some reason...
