During last week's debate over Bush's veto of the stem cell research bill, we heard a lot about embryo adoptions. The bill, which would allow stem cell research only on those frozen embryos left over from IVF clinics, was vetoed and there weren't enough votes to override it. The religious right likes to talk about embryo adoptions, including Sen. Brownback's surreal "please don't kill me" picture on the floor. The reality? Such adoptions, even with years of promotion by the Federal government, are virtually non-existent:
There are 400,000 embryos languishing in storage tanks at fertility clinics; only a very small number are candidates for adoption. "Even with federal funding available to encourage adoption, the number [of pregnancies from these embryos] is 128, which makes it conclusive that these 400,000 embryos will either be used for scientific research or thrown away," said Republican Sen. Arlen Specter, who supports expanded research. The legislation, which passed by wide margins in the Republican-controlled House and Senate but fell short of a vetoproof two-thirds majority, would only use embryos that would otherwise be discarded, and then only with the written consent of the couple that created them.
The only choice here is between throwing them out or using them for research. That's it. Anyone who thinks they're ever going to become a baby is living in a fantasy world.
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Won't someone please think of the snowflakes.
I like Jon Stewart's snowflake line: "Because they are all different,and they are all white..."
The snowflake kids that are being paraded around by politicians - are they the same kids all the time? :)
"Anyone who thinks they're ever going to become a baby is living in a fantasy world."
Pretty much par for this course.
The "snowflake adoption" myth is based on a political calculation that most people cannot follow a quantitative argument. Sadly, it's probably true. This approach is used to spoonfeed the public the same old BS year after year: a few examples of private soup kitchens "prove" that we don't need a publicly funded social safety net; a couple of privately funded labs "prove" that scientific research can be left to the market. Who cares if only 128 out of 400000 embryos have been "adopted." 128 kids are plenty enough to fill up a room for a photo op. That's all that matters.
windy:
This is a question that (unlike evolution) succumbs easily to simple mathematics. Let n be the number of photo ops and let k be the average number of kids in each. If nk>128, then, yes, some of the kids are being "paraded" repeatedly. That's an application of the pigeonhole principle (an elementary, yet potent form of mathematical reasoning).
More likely, a relatively small number of parents would let their kids be exploited in this way, so my guess is that the first statement is right: same kids every time.
Perhaps I'm a bit more cynical, but I question that these kids are even all "snowflakes."
Similarly, I suspect Brownback's snowflake picture was designed by a public relations firm.
But I won't go so far as to say maybe the Bushies expect to declare the 400,000 eligible to vote.
What you don't often hear about the snowflake baby adoption program is that for every successful "adoption", three or four more embryos are destroyed, and that is only if to embryos selected for implantation are of the highest quality.
Many of the 400,000 frozen embryos are not of high quality and have very little chance of making it through the adoption process.
So, given Bush's characterization of embryonic stem cell research as murder (via Tony Snow), the snowflake parents are each responsible for the murder of at least two or three human beings for every snowflake child they adopt. How ironic that Bush surrounded himself with a bunch of murderers when he vetoed the stem cell bill.
If we leave them to languish in a freezer, rather than "murdering" them, are their poor spirits just stuck and bored, longing for heaven (or hell, if you're a Calvinist, and they don't view all souls as "elect")? Aren't we doing these embryos a favor by expediting them to the supposed afterlife, rather than leaving them in stasis?
Ooh, don't let the anti-abortion people hear you say that. After all how souls have been saved by abortion doctors by preventing them from growing up past the age of accountability? Probably more than Billy Graham and the rest of the evangelists put together.
From a "Mother Jones", August 2006 article entitled "Souls on Ice"
"To be precise, the technical term is 'pre-embryo,' or 'conceptus'; a fertilized egg is not considered an embryo until about two weeks of development, and IVF embryos are frozen well before this point."
AND
"Less examined has been the fact that the embryo glut presents an immediate and pressing problem for the very people who helped create it: fertility doctors. In clinics around the country, doctors are at their wits' end trying to figure out what to do with embryos that have fallen, willy-nilly, under their moral, medical, and, possibly. legal purview."
"And the risk of holding them is considerable. 'I have tons of embryos, and I can't track down the owners,' said one Los Angeles doctor...His 'biggest nightmare,' he said. is that he will be unable to sell his practice when he is ready to retire, because no doctor will want to buy a practice that comes with a closetful of unclaimed embryos..."
Well at least that way they aren't becoming democrats.
It is about abortion, as much as they won't admit it. Allowing stem cells to be used for research is admitting that they don't have souls and that's a slippery slope into admitting that some fetuses don't have souls.