Clinical trials with embryonic stem cells are believed to be years away because of the risks and ethical problems involved in the production of embryos -- regarded as living humans by some people -- for scientific use.Heh.
This particular successful therapy used umbilical cord stem cells, which means we could go to a donor system instead of creating children for the purpose of harvesting their stem cells. This is a Good Thing. And look at this:
Additionally, umbilical cord blood stem cells trigger little immune response in the recipient [while] embryonic stem cells have a tendency to form tumors when injected into animals or human beings.This is really a win-win situation. I hope the process can be successfully repeated!
4 comments:
Just an FYI... I'm almost positive Kerry never suggested having people getting pregnant for the express purpose of harvesting stem cells.
The doner system would work there as well, by getting the stem cells that would've been incinerated anyway.
Of course if you're against abortion, and want to make it illegal across the board, this donor system wouldn't be possible of course if it was illegal.
But the fact remains that no one in political life has ever been so nutty as to suggest we should have human women producing stem cells like chickens laying eggs.
Only suggested that otherwise discarded materials could be utilized.
Although I don't have a problem with either, personally, I am in no way arguing in favour of abortion nor in favour of stem cell research - I'm just trying to clarify some possible confusion on the matter.
That said, of course some people LOVE misinformation or confusion, as long as it advances their cause. (They learn later the price was too high.)
"Just an FYI... I'm almost positive Kerry never suggested having people getting pregnant for the express purpose of harvesting stem cells."
Well, I would hope not! I mean, that is completely ridiculous.
The "FYI" above is true in just about everything it said. My problem with it isn't its clarification of the facts, but its generalization.
Some that support abortion (not saying that the Anonymous writer is a supporter of abortion), or even those that try to keep an open mind about everything (They say Independants, I say Undecideds ;D)often make a mistake in setting down broad labels for conservative and sometimes even liberal viewpoints.
What the posted stated was basically this. If abortion was not banned, then those times when a baby is aborted, its stem cells could be salvaged, much like organs are transplanted after death. In doing this, you'd have stem cells that could be used for science, instead of simply letting them go to waste.
Likewise, the poster mentions how if abortion was banned, as some people wish it to be (read: RIGHTEOUS RELIGIOUS CONSERVATIVE NUTJOBS) then it wouldn't matter anyway. Not saying he's anti-conservative or pro-liberal. Just saying.
The main beef I have with his/her clarification goes along with something I've been saying for awhile now. The sanctity of life is being forgotten in America. An aborted child is not a guy that died in a car accident. It isn't someone that was killed in his own home by a robber. It isn't a young child that died of cancer. It's a baby that the mother and/or father decided not to keep. To not let the child live.
To me, using tissue from a child killed like this is no better than robbing the body of a corpse. Sure, the baby can't use those parts anymore. It's dead. But it never had a chance.
You aren't digging up a grave to find the clue that could finally put away the killer. You aren't taking out its heart after a horrible crash to save the life of one suffering. You're taking pieces of a child sentenced to die before its time, so that you might save other lives in the future.
That almost sounds like a noble cause. But is it?
I believe in freedom. I believe in it very strongly. I believe in the freedom of speech, in the freedom to bear arms. In the freedom to abort. But I also believe in the freedom to make your own choices whether or not to give your body, alive or dead, to science.
To save many lives is a noble cause. And children can't make those decisions anyway. Until a certain age, parents make those calls. But how can you give that right to a parent that has just killed its baby because it showed up at an "inconvenient" time? (I've heard all the other possiblities of why the abortion HAS to happen. But whether the pregnancy would kill you, bring out the product of rape or incest, or whatever else, that doesn't change what the mother is doing when she makes that decision.)
What I mean to express is that there is noone out there with the authority to decide for that would-be child whether or not science can take of its remains.
Abortion likely will never be outlawed. Abortion will certainly never cease to occur. But when we start robbing the corpses of the children that could have been, where will we stop? Two hundred years ago, no one would have campaigned for a woman's right to abort. In two hundred more years, perhaps one just might campaign, encouraging young women to be artificially inseminated so that stem cells could be harvested from the fetus.
I believe in progession. I believe in moving forward. Morality is in the eye of the beholder. But without our lives, we would have no chance to behold our own morality.
And who are we to say that it's fair for us to take that chance away from anyone else? Especially those that never got to see our world for the first time.
-AJ
AJ, thank you for posting. You have mirrored my thoughts on the issue.
I'm also concerned about cloning embryos for the purpose of harvesting their stem cells. Wouldn't these clones grow into human beings, too? (Presuming, of course, that we are able to do it.) And so, to me, they should also be protected, with similar reasoning.
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