Mass Deception

I'm sure that everyone has heard in the media by now that President Obama has reversed President Bush's ban on Embryonic Stem Cell Research. The problem is that in most cases, most, if not all, of the details are lies.

First off, President Bush did not ban the research, in a gesture reflective of his devotion to life he banned the Federal Government from funding such research on lines of Embryonic Stem Cells created after August 9th of 2001. So Federal dollars could not be used to fund the creation and destruction of embryos in ongoing research, but the research did continue. There was funding at the State level, and there was private funding. Bush's so-called ban was a symbolic gesture, nothing more. Certainly it didn't stifle the research, as so many would have us believe. In order to take that argument seriously would be to believe that nothing worthwhile is ever developed without Government funding, and that's just silly.

The second big lie is the idea that only Embryonic Stem Cell Research holds any promise for health care application. The lies don't come much bigger than this one. The fact is that Embryonic Stem Cells have shown little or no promise in practical application, while adult Stem Cells and what are known as Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells have shown tremendous promise for many different applications. In fact, there are some treatments available today that are making use of Adult Stem Cells in repairing debilitating injuries and restoring quality of life to real people in real situations, the same cannot be said for Embryonic Stem Cells, and that is not because there were no Federal dollars funding the research, as I said, the research has been going on, but they face some pretty significant problems, the least of which is the few bucks they may or may not get from Uncle Sam.

The problem, as usual, is that the media can't be bothered with the facts, not when there is a political agenda to be won. They report on this story as though, now that the great President Obama has reversed the backwards decision of that moron that came before him, we'll have cured Cancer inside of a few weeks. It's ridiculous, but that's how they tend to report on things like this.

Another problem with the reporting is that they like to make believe that this is all about religious wackos trying to get in the way of science, but the fact is that there are genuine ethical concerns here that do not have a religious basis. Ethical concerns are always trying to find a balance with scientific research and discovery. They don't test nuclear bombs in Central Park, do they? Of course not, but that's not a practical scientific concern, it's an ethical one. We don't do medical experiments on humans (Fetuses and Embryo's not withstanding) and that also is an ethical, rather than a scientific concern.

You see, you could extract some Adult Stem Cells from me right now, and aside from some minor discomfort, I would be none the worse for wear. You can collect Umbilical Cord blood from newborns, with no ill effect on either the child or the mother (that is another promising source). But to collect Embryonic Stem Cells requires the destruction of the Embryo. But of course, the argument goes, that Embryo's are not people, sure, under the right conditions they could become people, but they're really not people. I would ask, how do you know? This is starting to sound a lot like the Abortion debate isn't it? Well, it should, it's related. The argument from the other side goes that, we don't know when they really become a person, so it's ok to use them as we see fit. This is a stunningly ignorant argument. If you see a burlap sack laying in the middle of the street, and you don't know if it's just a bag of old leaves, or if it's a bag of kittens, does not knowing make it ok to run over that bag, which might be full of kittens? Or would it be correct and ethical to be careful and protect the bag until you were able to look inside and see if it contains live kittens or not? To me the choice is clear.

If you must destroy something that may or may not be human life, is that not enough of an ethical dilemma to tell you that you should hold off on that? Even if it did hold great promise for curing all kinds of diseases and such, which, as I explained before, it does not.

This doesn't even cover all of the lies that are being propagated regarding this issue, but hopefully I've given you something to think about, and hopefully we can get past the lies, and learn the truth.