On Tuesday, David Mills posted a link to Andrew Sullivan’s blog note asking why conservatives who want to ban the manufacture of nascent children for the harvesting of stem cells (a practice Sullivan supports), do not also desire to ban the manufacture of nascent children via in vitro fertilization for implantation in female wombs, knowing most implanted embryos never make it to birth (the procedure often calls for the implantation of more than one human embryo), not counting those thousands in suspended animation who never even make it to the wombs.
Back in March, William Luse responded to a syndicated column by Charles Krauthammer that raised, for Bill, this same question (Krauthammer opposes the manufacture of children for research, but doesn’t mind if we use the excess nascent human beings leftover from earlier procedures at infertility clinics). Luse demonstrates a contradiction in Krauthammer’s position:
This isn’t working, is it? ... In both cases, an extra-uterine conception was effected by means of laboratory wizardry—in the first for the purpose of harvesting ‘parts,’ the second for the purpose of making a baby. Or was it? Actually, it seems to have been conceived in case it was needed. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be sitting frozen on a shelf. Its value is contingent upon a necessity. It was desired not for its own sake, but as an adjunct to its parents’ needs, in the event it might prove useful sometime in the future. It was conceived with the understanding that it might have to be abandoned. And since it has been abandoned, it is not useful...unless it can be thawed out, killed, and its ‘parts’ harvested.
Though Mr. Krauthammer thinks this second instance of killing to be acceptable because the act is once removed from the original intention, we seem to end up in the same place, don’t we? The very place he so dreads: “the manufacture of human embryos for the purpose of their dissection and use for parts.” And if this second kind of killing is embraced, won’t it tend to inure us to the horror of the first...
What to do with “leftover” human embryos is one of those dilemmas we’ve gotten ourselves into because some other wickedness preceded it. But if Mr. Krauthammer sees any evil in the in vitro technique, another form of “manufacture,” he doesn’t mention it.
[Emphasis mine. —Ken]
The entire response can be read at Luse’s Apologia.
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