Sunny Days in Heaven
Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven


Wednesday, March 16, 2005  

Reading the fine print

Via The Corner comes this link which offers an analysis of various state bills being introduced to facilitate embryonic stem cell research. What this observer finds is chilling.

However, at their cores, both the House and Senate bills [Washington] would permit cloned fetal farming. Like the Senate, the House bill would explicitly permit human cloning. And, like the Senate bill, it would also permit cloned fetal farming by prohibiting the "cloning of a human being," while defining the concept politically (instead of biologically) as implanting the cloned embryo in order to bring about the birth of a cloned baby. Thus, under both bills, if the purpose of cloning and implantation is the gestation of a cloned fetus for use in medical experiments or body part harvesting, no law would be broken. (My emphasis)



This means that you could implant a cloned embryo into a woman and then at a later time, harvest the baby and use it for whatever purpose you like since the fetus was never intended to be born.

If this isn't chilling, what is? If this dosn't smack of nightmares, horror stories, mad scientists - what does?

I realize that the first person to refer to the Nazis in any argument loses, but how this is substantially different from Nazi instrumentality? Or simply call it a combination of good old American Pragmatism (thank you John Dewey) and scientific nihilism.

You wonder how the very stones do not cry out in pain.
Here is a poem I wrote years ago entitled:


Epitaph for a Fetus


One beaker of blood, gorgeous bright red.
One broken, sharded beaker of glass.
The brilliant murk of blood seeps into dirt.
The soil cannot cry out - what trespasses?
Bright eyes observe, weeping arrows of light.
The earth, or mud of marrow, guts, and veins
cannot cry out. What is able to moan
when rocks, bones, sand and shade are mute as dust?
No loon or curlew's cry disturbs the air.
Clouds gravely pass unloading griefless tears.
Brief flurries of snow sweep past barren strands.
Blood, unanimated blood, clots and coarsens.
Beakers full shatter and shatter and shatter.

posted by Mark Butterworth | 1:53 PM |

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