MedPol: Romney vetoes stem cell bill, veto to be overturned
Not to be outdone by Bill Frist, Mitt Romney is doing his own '08 electioneering for the Righteous Right by symbolically vetoing a stem cell bill that has sufficient support to push its way on through. As I've said before, don't run for governor in the state with one of the most important biomedical research centers in the world if you're an anti-progress douchebag. Romney's actions have no ramifications for him, as the bill will not be impeded, but this sure does look good to the labjizz-is-life crowd.
5 comments:
let's define the rare paramenter: rare because abortion is A) psychologically difficult for a woman because of arbitrary cultural beliefes and B) a surgical procedure (like a boob job or a tonsillectomy) which carries an inherent risk de facto.
not rare because abortion is a "necessary evil" or because early term fetuses have rights.
Whoa. That's a... unique... turn of phrase. I tip my hat to you, sir.
I've wondered: seeing as how those embryos have already come off the "assembly line" (as it were) their destiny will be to sit frozen until a power failure melts them (and they die) or they get harvested. Is that inaccurate?
That sounds quite true sir. Defining a laboratory-created embryo as "life" is very much a semantic exercise.
while that's true as a logical endpoint, it's pretty damn useless from a practical standpoint.
maybe we can't define life, but without question, i know you're alive, and you know i'm alive. you could say that was just semantics too, and you'd be right. except that's completely useless bullshit. we can talk about how we "know" things, but who cares for the purpose of this argument?
the significance of the distinction's arbitrariness is that it's not NECESSARY to say that an embryo is human life. it's of course not NECESSARY to say that I'm alive, but it's sorta useless to say I'm not. there are more practical ramifications of ascribing this status to the goop in a petri dish.
philosophy majors never worry about what's useful and what's not :)
we only need to have respect for the complexity of personal and societal values to the extent that those values are inert.
and this demonstrates the activist versus the philosopher. of course, the decision whether these values are inert is, once again, entirely arbitrary and a function of the context of other complex values.
but teleology aside, physicians are advocates. being an advocate requires that sides are chosen if possible. the sides in the stem cell debate are A) cell culture in enriched media, vs B) someone's grandpa with Parkinson's disease. of course that's not balanced-perspective phrasing, as the alternative advocate could delineate A) the potential for human life, vs B) a human life which God has decided to let run its course.
But I don't buy that second dichotomy. I buy the first.
and as long as Grandpa is stumbling around w/ a festinating gait and tardive dyskinesia, I see what ever verbal means necessary to advocate for him as appropriate.
And let's face it, by calling embryos 'lab jizz,' I'm obviously trying to be amazingly offensive. Because sometimes being offensive is funny!
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