Public Policy: Cell Division.(stem cell research: public and political opinion)(Brief Article)

President bush opposes federal funding for research on stem cells taken from human embryos because the research would destroy the embryos. He is under intense pressure to reverse his position. The media are almost as gung-ho for this cause as for campaign-finance reform. And some politicians who usually vote with pro-lifers-notably Sens. Orrin Hatch, Strom Thurmond, Gordon Smith, and John McCain, and former senator Connie Mack-have also urged Bush to fund the research.

Advocates brandish polls suggesting that most Americans, even most pro- lifers, support this funding. These polls are meaningless. Since most people have not spent much time thinking about the issue, poll results vary greatly depending on the wording of the questions. (Opponents of the research have found that most people are with them when the questions mention that the research destroys human embryos.) For the same reason, most people are unlikely to vote based on the issue.

We do not know which decision would be better for Bush politically. What we can evaluate are the moral arguments that supporters of the research have used to get pro-lifers to surrender their objections. These arguments plainly fail.

Some such supporters have advanced the curious notion that a human embryo that has not been implanted in a womb cannot be a human person; so it is acceptable to destroy that embryo. To consider implantation a criterion for personhood is to make a fetish of location. If we had the technology to develop an embryo all the way to infancy, toddlerdom, and beyond, without ever being implanted, would anyone deny that these older human beings had a right to life?

Some libertarians, meanwhile, have become attached to the idea that opposition to embryonic stem-cell research is ridiculous because early embryos are human only in the same sense that every human cell is human. An embryo contains the genetic code for a human being, goes the argument, but so do the skin cells we lose in the shower. They, too, are "potential human beings" because emerging ...