Embryonic Stem Cell Funding is Worse than Abortion
Richard Stith,
Posted on 07/19/2006

Several prominent anti-abortion politicians, including Orrin Hatch and Bill Frist, joined the Senate majority in endorsing the public funding of embryonic stem cell research. To the casual observer it might appear that the arguments against abortion must be stronger than those against publicly funding the destruction of embryos. This conclusion, however, would be mistaken. The funding of destructive embryo research is actually worse than legal abortion.

Some might disagree, arguing that the continuing identity of a developing being means that embryo research cannot be better or worse than abortion. The politicians are wrong to say it is not as bad as abortion, but it is also wrong to say that it is worse. All stages of life are stages of the same being. Each of us was once a human embryo. Each of us is just a human embryo that has grown up. And we have been alive the whole time we have been growing and developing that is, since fertilization. If one of us had been killed at any time before we were born, a human life would have been lost. So abortion and lethal research on embryos are equally bad.

Others might argue that, if there is any difference, abortion is the worse of the two. For abortion involves not only killing but betrayal. In abortion, parents destroy an unborn child entrusted to them, who depends on them, a child whom they have a moral duty to nurture. By contrast, the scientist who dissects an embryo is not harming his own offspring. He wrongs life, but not necessarily the family. So how can one possibly contend that embryo research is worse? the rest