If You Believe Embryos Are Humans...

By Michael Kinsley

President Bush is said to be hoping for a compromise on whether to allow federally funded medical research on cells from human embryos. Compromise is a worthy goal. But on this issue, the notion of compromise is an odd one for a couple of reasons.

First, the Clinton Administration's rules that Bush has suspended while he searches for a compromise are themselves a compromise. They forbid federally funded researchers to destroy human embryos, but they allow the use of stem cells from embryos destroyed by others. What Bush wants is a compromise of a compromise.

Second, the argument for banning this research depends on absolutism. It's not just that people who oppose research using embryos feel strongly about it. It's that the entire logic of their case makes it hard to give them anything they would value as half a loaf.

To justify standing in the way of cures for some of humanity's most dreaded diseases, you have to accept the right-to-life argument in its most extreme form. We're talking here about newly formed embryos. These are not fetuses with tiny, waving hands and feet. These are microscopic groupings of a few differentiated cells. There is nothing human about them, except potential--and, if you choose to believe it, a soul. Moreover, under the rules Bush is blocking, stem-cell research would not actually take the life of a single embryo. Researchers would use embryos that are being discarded anyway.

To anyone who actually believes that new embryos are just as human as you or me, this last point is like saying, "Well, the Holocaust is going on anyway, so we might as well turn a few dead Jews into lampshades." Accommodating to evil is evil. But if this is your line, you had better really, really believe that discarding embryos is just like gassing Jews. That's because if you get your way, then real, fully formed people will suffer and die for your abstract point of principle. In fact, real people will suffer and die as a result of any compromise that partly accommodates your abstract principle. For that matter, real people will suffer and die because of the months every breakthrough has been delayed while Bush looks for a compromise. And because of Clinton's compromise. And because of all the years federal stem-cell research was banned before that.

Even if the recently discovered adult stem cells turn out to be almost as good as embryonic ones, which many politicians are hoping will spare them a tough decision, that "almost" will lead to unnecessary suffering and death if adult cells become an excuse to restrict embryonic ones. So, if that's what you think justice for embryos requires, you had better be sure you're right.

Are we really going to start basing social policy on the assumption that a few embryonic cells equal a human being? If so, restricting research on discarded embryos is an odd place to start. Why not restrict fertility clinics, which routinely produce more embryos than they need and destroy the surplus? To pursue the gruesome Holocaust analogy, it's like outlawing the lampshades while ignoring the gas chambers. And yet President Bush is not searching for compromise on the issue of fertility clinics because there is no such issue. The Roman Catholic Church and others are publicly opposed to high-tech fertilization techniques, but they are not beating the drum about it.

And fertility clinics are not the only place where embryos are routinely destroyed in the course of making a baby. Every year, in the U.S. alone, nature (or God) kills hundreds of thousands of embryos so young that the bearer didn't even know she was pregnant. About 15% of pregnancies end in miscarriage, most of them in the embryo stage. Although there is research going on to reduce miscarriages for the sake of would-be mothers, there is no big crusade to save the lives of these lost embryos. Why not?

Contrast this widespread tolerance, if not acceptance, of the mass slaughter of embryos, even among right-to-lifers, with the huge fuss that antiabortion forces have stirred up over the relatively rare practice they insist on calling partial-birth abortions. This campaign emphasizes how recognizably human end-of-term fetuses are. The explicit or implicit argument is that these physical human qualities are at least part of what makes late-term abortions as morally objectionable as killing a postbirth human being. Either this argument is utterly disingenuous or the corollary must be that destruction of a newly conceived embryo is morally less objectionable.

If stem-cell research is banned or limited on the principle that just-conceived embryos have rights just like the rest of us, that will be a principle applied almost nowhere else. It's a principle that few people actually believe in and one that almost nobody--not even sincere right-to-lifers--really lives by.