Even the politicians who favor stem cell research tend to give undue deference to the ridiculous argument that use of embryonic stem cells should be avoided if possible, with this sort of language:
"The involved scientists should be allowed to continue using embryos left over from in vitro fertilization, which would otherwise be destroyed, until such time as they are clearly able to produce stem cells from other sources that achieve the objectives."
At the stage at which they are useful for stem cell production, embryos consist of less than 150 identical cells. There is not even the beginning of specialization into nerve cells that would give rise to the possibility of personhood.
It would be wrong to *damage* a 150-cell embryo in such a way that it continues to develop into a person but the future person will suffer as a result of the damage.
But there is nothing wrong at all with simply destroying a 150-cell embryo with the consent of the parents (it is no worse than if the embryo had never been made in the first place)
Stumble This
Politics can be a race to the center. But like sumo wrestling, you can use your opponent's strength against him as he charges towards you dodge out of the way.
How many more people are going to be against emergency contraception as a consequence of both parties' feigning belief in the sanctity of 3 day old microscopic embryos in their respective propaganda campaigns?
Politics has become the art of misdirection in which concerns are sidestepped by appeals to only the benefit side of the cost-benefit analysis.
another point is that even the 'bush ban' only stopped *federal* funding, while still allowing full embryonic stem cell research to be funded privately - it follows that a free market looking at 'extremely promising' medical techniques springing from the embryonic cells would find its funding adequate vis a vis its *promise* - and the bush restriction was only on *new* embryonic lines, not those already researched (and found unproductive)
furthermore, those that claim that private research was running into a lack of viable embryonic stem cells harvested for research... well, evidently they are leaving out the fact that undifferentiated stem cells do not face the 'hayflick limit' - meaning that the cell lines can be divided indefinitely (immortal cells) because of no shortening of their telomeres during cell replication
i may be misunderstanding some part of the science, but in this day of polemics and political rhetoric... i suspect that those against the bush (and clinton, iirc) decision weren't showing all their cards
imho, overstated arguments = lost credibility