Editor,
Embryonic stem cell research has the potential to revolutionize medicine and save millions of lives. Yet many legislators are frantically working to defeat a measure that would expand federal financing of this research. Why are they and so many others opposing embryonic stem cell research and doing so under the banner of being pro-life?
Embryos used in embryonic stem cell research are not human beings - not in any rational sense of the term. These embryos are smaller than a grain of sand and consist of at most a few hundred undifferentiated cells. They have no body or body parts. They do not see, hear, feel or think. While they have the potential to become human beings - if implanted in a woman's uterus and brought to term - they are nowhere near actual human beings.
What, then, is the pro-lifers' reason for regarding these collections of cells as sacred and attributing rights to them? Religious dogma.
The pro-lifers accept on faith the belief that rights are a gift from an unknowable supernatural being bestowed on embryos at conception, which many extend to embryos conceived in a beaker. But rights are principles of proper political interaction rooted in mankind's rational nature. Rights recognize the fact that people can only live successfully and happily among one another if they are free from the threats of force against them. The concept is inapplicable to tiny, prehuman clusters of cells that are incapable of such actions.
The enemies of embryonic stem cell research are brazenly willing to force countless human beings to suffer and die from lack of treatments so that clusters of cells remain untouched. To call such a stance pro-life is absurd. These people's allegiance is not to human life or to human rights, but to their dogma.
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If these enemies of human life wish to deprive themselves of the benefits of stem cell research, they should be free to do so and die faithful to the last. But any attempt to impose their religious dogma on the rest of the population is both evil and unconstitutional. In the name of the actual sanctity of human life and the inviolability of rights, embryonic stem cell research must be allowed to proceed unimpeded. Our lives may depend on it.
Damian Erasmus
UNM alumnus
