Go ask one of those opponents of stem cell research why it’s OK to donate a kidney. They’ll look at you like you’re nuts. They’ll tell there’s a person who’s about to die and another person with an extra kidney, and it’s all that simple.
In 2006 you won’t hear any protest that kidney donation is something Frankenstein would do. Stem cell research opponents won’t assert that the extra kidney constitutes a “human life” even though it is alive and human. They won’t tell you that kidney transplants are morally wrong. They won’t claim that a kidney has an invisible soul.
Instead, they will reassure you that a spare kidney is not a unique human being. They will tell you that kidney cells are only “potential” human beings (reproductive cloning, illegal in most countries, could accomplish this). As icing on the cake, they will assert that kidneys don’t feel any pain.
At that point you’ll need to jump in. For starters, you might remind the stem cell research opponents that blastocysts (from which stem cells are harvested) are clumps of about 150 cells small enough to fit inside Roosevelt’s eye on a U.S. dime [1].
You might then add that blastocysts are only five days old when the stem cells are harvested. At this point in time, the stem cells are pluripotent [1]: they can develop into all the different cell types in the body (except the placenta), but they have not yet developed into any specialized type of cell. Consequently, blastocysts do not contain any nerve cells. “They” cannot feel any pain.
Functional human beings each have some sort of brain. Without nerve cells, though, human animals are only as “aware” as department store manikins. Stem cells don’t have any nerve cells at all. They thus have even fewer nerve cells than Terry Schaivo, who was considered brain dead and therefore declared dead. She was a breathing corpse. She was a dead, even though she had some functioning nerves. Maybe this isn’t a good example to use on conservatives, because many of them believe that Terri Schaivo was alive despite her total lack of coherent thought.
It seems that the dispute between pro and anti-stem cell research positions boils down to this. The people opposing stem cell research claim that a clump of cells without any nerves is a functional human being despite having with no nerve cells, [2] simply based on that clump’s potential to grow into a human being (if implanted in a womb). The same logic would hold that an acorn is already an oak tree. People trying to have babies don’t consider frozen fertilized eggs to be “babies.” When those fertilized eggs don’t successfully implant, the “parents” don’t have funerals for those fertilized eggs.
As I pondered this issue tonight, it occurred to me that this is yet another instance of conservatives fighting hard to deny that human beings are animals. They argue that a clump of stem cells without a single nerve is a human being, as though an invisible and undetectable soul can do the work of a complex neural network. This claim is absurd. Show me any animal without any nerves and I’ll show you an animal that has no feelings, no thoughts and no emotions. Any claim to the contrary is superstition based on wild imagination.
That a nerve-less clump of cells is sentient (that it can think) is a claim that nerves don’t actually do the work of cognition. This is actually a claim that, somehow, there is sentience in the total absence of nerve cells.
Many conservative Believers abhor the thought that they are animals. I’ve written about this repeatedly. They don’t like to think of themselves as being on the same tree of life as the other plants and animals [3] (thus leading to their disparagement of Darwin). They refuse to see the precursors of morality in other mammals. [4] They don’t like to consider that human bodies work the same way as the bodies of many other animals [5]. They hate to use the term “human animals.” Gad! That term implies that humans share many functions with the other animals. Functions such as eating, sleeping and breathing. And pooping. [6]
My thought for tonight is that conservative Believers oppose stem cell research because they refuse to recognize the obvious truth that human animals are animals.
Why does it bother them so much? Is it because animals die and they don’t want to die? Is it that simple? I’ll be thinking about this topic some more, as I eat, sleep, breathe and poop. You see, I’m a human animal. Not that there is anything wrong with it.
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