This week we mourn the passing of Christopher Reeve, which naturally brings up the issue of embryonic stem cell research. You can talk yourself hoarse trying to explain the science of stem cells to a so-called “compassionate” conservative. You can talk about “pluripotent” stem cells and their remarkable ability to regenerate into any type of cell; they’ll look at you as if you’re a pagan psycho who’s suggesting we create baby farms for organ harvesting. It gets you nowhere because it runs right into the most intractable argument they have, which is “Abortion is Murder”.

Appeals to the stem cell’s potential of saving lives is ironically wasted on a “pro-lifer”. To the “sanctity of life” crowd, Superman dies confined to a wheelchair for nine years and Ronald Reagan dies not knowing he was president. Some sanctity. They just cannot reconcile their uninformed idea that we are killing babies to save adults.

You can point out that doctors create thousands of embryos in fertility clinics, keep them in freezers, and eventually discard most of them that instead could be used to help treat spinal cord injuries, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s diseases. You’re wasting your breath. Those embryos are just fine when they help some infertile Midwestern woman give birth to a litter of septuplets, but we forbid you to research them for possible cures for Muhammad Ali or Michael J. Fox. No, you must throw them away because they could have been babies once.

When faced with someone who holds such an indefensible, obstinate position, I never try to argue with them using facts and science. Why would I? These people believe in creationism, virgin birth, curing homosexuals, and that George W. Bush is a strong intelligent leader with good Christian qualities. Arguing facts with them is like trying to teach a pig to sing; it just wastes your time and annoys the pig.

Instead, I like to force them to defend their position to its logical conclusion. I love watching a conservative forced to argue their absolutist philosophy against itself in the face of all logic, science, and reason; nothing amuses me more. (Except perhaps a tattered Chinese-made American flag, flying from the window of a beat-up used Mexican-built SUV, sporting bumper stickers that say “Support Our Troops”, “W.W.J.D.?” and “Bush/Cheney ’04”, driven by a poor minority woman with an asthmatic child, on her way to her job at a non-union manufacturing plant that pollutes the air. I’m a huge fan of irony. But I digress.)

This is what they’ll try to defend: Life begins at conception. When sperm and egg meet, that embryo is a human being that deserves the same level of protection as living humans. Abortion is the killing of a human being. Therefore, embryonic stem cell research is murder because we should allow no doctor to kill an embryo by extracting its stem cells.

But these stem-cell embryos come from fertility clinics, which means (by their logic) that these doctors have been tending baby farms for infertile couples, freezing babies for storage, and tossing away the rejects. It’s not even a baby farm for organ harvesting; it’s to grow a whole baby, except for the many they never use and discard.

So let’s get this straight – we can harvest embryos to treat a woman who can’t conceive a new baby but we cannot harvest cells from embryos to save an old baby? That seems remarkably inconsistent to me, considering that most of the embryos don’t ever become babies and we throw them away!

If aborting one embryo is murder, then certainly destroying many embryos to make one or more zygotes is far worse. Unless we can recruit the willing host mothers or decrease the fertilized eggs to the point where we destroy no embryos, then in-vitro fertilization is murder. After all, no woman deserves to bear a child at the expense of dead babies, just as Christopher Reeve didn’t deserve a chance to walk again at the expense of dead babies, right?

I guess it’s time to shut down those fertility clinics; no more in-vitro fertilization. Those barren Midwestern girls will just have to pray harder for those septuplets that will never be born. On the bright side, I guess that means seven less ignorant compassionate conservative voters in eighteen years.

These people when flustered will often backpedal into their last sanctuary, a religious argument. This is when the Bible is your best weapon. Hit them with Genesis 2:7 – And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. Embryos don’t breathe. They have no nostrils into which God may breathe. You might make an argument that a fetus in a womb attached to an umbilical cord is “breathing”. Nevertheless, right here, in the Word of God, I see that non-breathing unattached embryos have no soul. (This atheist loves making Biblical points. I told you, I like irony.)

Every now and then, you’ll find you’ve gotten into an argument with one of the few of these people who can string together two sentences without saying “God”, “Jesus”, or “the Bible”. For these people you can take the discussion into the light of reason. Acorns are not oak trees and embryos are not babies. There is an absolute difference between that which is human and that which is human cells. We take living blood cells and bone marrow from living humans to help heal other living humans. We take organs and skin from dead humans to transplant into living humans. We’re apparently not against harvesting our bodies to further our lives.

Science has always triumphed in the face of ignorant religious superstition and it will again. Religious zealots fought birth control, transplantation, blood transfusion, surgery, and even doctors, but eventually the people became enlightened and society has been the better for it. The problem is that too many people and their families must suffer waiting for the ignorant to become educated.

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