Letter: Using science to save lives a moral obligation

Saturday, July 7, 2007 | 7:09 a.m.

Throughout history people have offered strong practical and moral arguments against the progression of science - arguments such as: "Don't sail that ship out across the ocean or you will be swept off the edge of the Earth" and "Mr. Galileo, if you do not recant your statement that the Earth rotates around the sun, which demeans God, the church and common sense, we will be forced to burn you at the stake."

William F. Brennan, in his June 28 letter, offers us a spate of reasons why embryonic stem cell research is impractical and unnecessary. Indeed, there is an ongoing debate in the scientific community about many of these things. But his most forceful argument is a "simple" moral one, which states that it is wrong to kill a fertilized human egg because it will inevitably develop into a person.

This is anything but a "simple" moral argument. The embryos in question have almost zero chance of ever developing into individual churchgoers, day laborers, politicians or rock stars. A few dozen of these embryos were adopted by women who had them implanted in their uteri and eventually gave birth. That leaves tens of thousands of embryos which have been and will continue to be dumped.

Now, suppose that all of the orphan embryos found women who were willing to gestate them. Anywhere from 25 percent to 50 percent of all fertilized eggs will either fail to implant or will spontaneously abort. These "acts of God" further erode the inevitability of individual life. From a worldwide perspective, with hundreds of millions of naturally dead embryos and fetuses in any given year, God begins to look like the ultimate proponent of abortion.

The highest morality is that we use our reason and our compassion to decide the best use of our doomed embryos and not be swayed by arguments that can be shown not to hold water.

Bob Hannah, Henderson