Objections to President Obama’s lifting of the Bush administration ban on federal funding to international groups that perform abortions and his voicing of support for human embryonic stem cell research seem to have set my gray matter to working and wondering in a Cartesian sense: “I think, therefore I am.”
We can philosophically fashion in our thoughts great concern for a single cell that has no capacity for thinking on its own, and at the same time register less regard for a colony of cells that shares a common skin, has a birth certificate, and does as much thinking as any of the rest of us.
However, this concern for the fate of a single cell is not necessarily extended to just any old single cell. Little mention is ever made of a single cell of the nose, toes, gonads or ovaries. The focus is confined to the fate of a single cell called an embryo-the term suggesting its potential to someday be aware all on its own.
But the concern accorded to the non-think embryonic cell is not typically extended to some equally capacious cells called egg and sperm. And even an embryo may be allowed to perish from the chemical abortion that can ensue from birth-control pills.
Please excuse some aside thinking, but can anyone explain why church pews on Sunday are no longer filled with families of nine and ten? Hum . . . and has anyone had a long wait in line at her pharmacy while right-to-life protesters demonstrate against the dispensing of murderous birth-control prescriptions? But, thank God, there have been some objections over a new and more potent version of the pill that is provided for the morning-after. As some have said: how irresponsible; if not abstinence, at least regular precaution could be taken in advance.
And while protesting in defense of embryos, we may ignore the fate of completed humans that are painfully aware of the destruction they face: from collateral damage of war, starvation in some forsaken land, diseases still suffered from eschewal of promising embryonic-stem-cell research, executions on death row that can be accommodated within our awareness, or just some near death by waterboarding.
Oh well, some must suffer that others may live until they and their gray matter are pronounced deceased – certified dead as dead may be, though many of their other cells may still be alive and kicking. Brain dead, you dead, we say.
Not that I may find the time to go, but does anyone know where right-thinking people will be holding their next protest or silent vigil? I’d be there, but I will most likely be at home holding my own rendezvous with hypocrisy—the partial kind.
Sam Osborne can be reached for comment at [email protected].
