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Just this month, Jack Kevorkian, the Dr. Death of the euthanasia movement, was released from prison after serving eight years for killing a patient with Lou Gehrig's disease. The proponents of euthanasia have been temporarily slowed, however, unable to persuade any state but Oregon to join the campaign for "physician-assisted suicide."
But if Americans show a distaste for approving the lethal dispatch of the chronically or terminally ill, they are being more easily seduced by an equally lethal proposal at the other end of life's spectrum.
Embryonic stem-cell research -- despite its lack of scientific success and the number of morally licit alternatives -- has been garnering increased political and financial support.
Indeed, states from New Jersey to California have authorized funding for embryonic stem-cell research, offsetting efforts by the federal government to restrict its own funding of such programs.
The strategy of advocates is to combine celebrity campaigns with the promise of cures for some of our most troubling illnesses, such as Alzheimer's.
While huge sums of money are being invested in the promotion of embryonic stem-cell research, little has been produced by this research except, in the words of one critic, a lot of dead lab rats. Where success exists is in the use of stem cells obtained from adults, or from blood found in umbilical cords. What particularly troubles moralists is that embryonic stem-cell research not only involves the destruction of human embryos, but it also will likely lead to the cloning of embryos so that science will have an unlimited supply to destroy through experimentation.
When it comes to embryonic stem-cell research, society seems willing to extinguish the life of the unborn in order to achieve a potential cure for others. Pro-life proponents have been unable to generate the kind of widespread outrage, or even ambivalence, that has characterized other pro-life struggles.
Society's tolerance for this kind of destruction of human beings at their earliest stage of life -- even as it flinches at the destruction of children and adults suffering from severe handicaps or dreaded illnesses -- suggests that pro-lifers have not yet been able to find a compelling or convincing argument for defending society's weakest citizens: the unborn at their earliest stages of life.
This is more ironic for the fact that this destruction is so medically unnecessary.
Winning state approval of laws that allow for such destruction may not actually help heal anyone, but such legislation does serve the agenda of abortion supporters who hope to make such "socially beneficial" killing the basis for rejecting other claims on behalf of the unborn.
A thriving industry in the destruction of the unborn makes it that much more unlikely that any state will reverse itself on the right to life of the human race's smallest and least protected members.
Catholics and other religious believers must continue to press ahead in support of legislation that protects the unborn and rejects embryonic stem-cell research and the cloning of human embryos.
No matter what the disease, we cannot support the destruction of innocent human life, even for the sake of another human being. To allow otherwise inevitably erodes legislative and philosophical safeguards that can only lead to greater and greater abuses of human beings.
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