Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Opposition to embryonic stem cell research: how is it not hypocrisy?
Last night, Karen and I watched a Law and Order episode about embryonic stem cell research. The perp, an ESCR researcher suffering from Parkinson’s disease, had tried to kill an Ann Coulter-esque demagogue who railed against the ESCR cause. He missed, killing someone else instead. On to the trial.
Despite this episode’s peculiar incoherence, the writers managed one good line. Cue the stereotypical Perry Mason scene where the perp, taking the stand, cracks under pressure. He screams at the Ann Coulter clone (and I paraphrase): I AM BETTER THAN A CLUMP OF CELLS IN A PETRI DISH!
Know what? I’m better than a clump of cells, and so is my wife, and my son, and each and every one of you. Each of the American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan is better than a clump of cells, as well as each Iraqi, Afghani, Taliban, and al Qaeda operative. Even George W. Bush is better than a clump of cells.
Wow. That was difficult to write. At least now, you know where I’m coming from. So here’s the question: why do pro-lifers loudly oppose ESCR but stay silent about the thousands of embryos destroyed every year as standard operating procedure at IVF clinics worldwide? Why is it evil to donate an unused embryo for medical research purposes, but okay to flush it down the drain?
Discussion and speculations below the cut . . .
When I researched this question, the main thing I found were other folks asking the same thing. In a spirited discussion of this issue at AlterNet, janvdb writes:
Just why is it that, in the fertility clinic, a couple who deliberately sets about with full information and creates 10 or 12 fully conceived, divided and re-divided blastocysts can, after achieving that one desired pregnancy, toss them all right into the dumpster without navigating past a placard-waving maniac while the hapless couple who accidentally creates one blastocyst and feels they must end it for any of a dozen serious, difficult reasons are “murderers?”
Why aren’t the pro-life people concerned about the thousands of embryos which are deliberately created and discarded by fertility clinics?
It’s a real head-scratcher, isn’t it? From a discussion at Blue Gal’s blog, I found this article at Mother Jones in which California Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, “a reliably anti-abortion Republican member of the House,” explains why abortion = bad, destroying frozen embryos = acceptable:
“I have done a lot of soul-searching but also a lot of rethinking about reality, and what’s going on here, and I have come to the conclusion that I’m…first, I’m still pro-life. But I always said that life begins at conception. But…I was always predicating that on the idea that life begins at conception when conception begins in a woman’s body.â€
Now, Rohrabacher realizes, conception can take place outside the human body. That, for him, is a meaningful difference. The crux of the matter: Is the embryo in the womb, or is it in a lab? “I don’t think that the potential for human life exists in a human embryo until it’s implanted in a human body. So you are not destroying a human life by basically not using a fertilized egg. These are not potential human lives until they are implanted in a body. Left alone, they will not become a human being. When they are implanted in a female body, they have a chance to become a human being, so I still would be opposed to abortion.â€
I call bullshit. Of course they’re “potential” human lives. Give me a break.
Abortion muddies the waters, though. Reading this, I wished the interviewer had asked Rohrabacher his opinion on ESCR; but, hey, that’s what Google is for. And at the risk of weakening my argument regarding the pro-life movement’s hypocrisy, here’s what I learned: after he and his wife went through the IVF process (successfully), he reversed his initially negative stance on ESCR (but for every Rohrabacher, there are dozens of George Bushes sticking to their illogical positions).
That Michael Kinsley editorial (linked in the last sentence) is worth reading, since he cuts through the bullshit quite nicely:
To the nonabsolutist, it ought to matter a lot that restricting stem-cell research doesn’t actually spare the lives of any embryos. That means the lives of real people desperately awaiting the fruits of stem-cell research are being weighed against a purely symbolic message.
. . . but Kinsley, too, fails to address the question. Why all the focus on ESCR, and no focus whatsoever on the embryos which die as a result of IVF?
El Fuego at Democratic Underground has one answer:
Want to know why? It is because there is no WOMAN to be harassed.
Even if they actually cared about IVF embryos, they’re not going to take on the male-dominated corporate-medical complex. They want to go after one of the more vulnerable members of society, the pregnant woman. They enjoy using strong arm tactics to force their morality on a pregnant woman who may be scared, poor and barely getting by in life. They want the feeling of power to be able to force a woman to bear children.
Because their nonchalance about IVF clinics shows they damn sure don’t care about embryos, fetuses, or babies. Their indifference to IVF embryo deaths just serve to prove beyond a doubt what we all knew already: THE “PRO-LIFE” MOVEMENT IS ONLY ABOUT MISOGYNY.
While we’re sympathetic to this point of view, Karen and I take a more Marxist view of history, past and present. We think it’s about money and power — especially here in America, where, for the most part, IVF is far more accessible to the wealthy:
With a few exceptions, most notably the US, developed countries have recognized that infertility is a medical condition and have made provisions within national health policies to cover infertility treatment, including IVF. For example, Australia, Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, The Netherlands, Norway and Sweden provided public funding for IVF as of June 2000 (ref. 25). In the US, the health insurance industry views infertility as a “socially constructed need†rather than a disease or medical condition26, and IVF has been labelled as “experimental†and thereby excluded from coverage. The effect of these policies has been to create tremendous inequities in the availability of infertility treatment. In the US, the costs of infertility treatment are usually borne by infertile couples, including an estimated 85% of the cost of IVF27. Perhaps for this reason, fewer than half of infertile American women seek medical treatment, and those that do are generally Caucasian, older, married and with middle- to high-incomes4. In the US, 14 out of 50 states have mandated that minimum levels of infertility coverage be available, but do not necessarily mandate that employers should offer such coverage, or that IVF should be covered.
My hypothesis is that the pro-life community doesn’t want to take on the wealthy and powerful. These folks may even want to protect their own access to IVF.
If I’m right, opposition to ESCR will melt away the minute ESCR shows proven benefit to a disease affecting the old, the white, the wealthy: Alzheimer’s, for example, or Parkinson’s disease. Even Type I diabetes, since it affects the children of poor and wealthy alike. Once we have a body of pro-ESCR constituents who are not poor, female, and ethnic, the pro-life crowd will slink off into the corner and find something else to bitch about.
D.
I can’t remember where exactly, but I have heard some pro-lifers complain about embryos being destroyed rather than given to infertile couples. As they believe they’re human beings.
When I started reading your post, I thought that the reason right to lifers get all foamy over abortions is because most are given to godless liberals, poor women, and minorities. None of those groups matter to the rich, not really. They have to keep their place, after all. I never understood why they so despise abortions yet provide absolutely no alternative. None. No one is out there preaching adoption instead of abortion (it’s always you made it, you keep it) or encouraging contraception (can’t do that! It’s a sin!), self confidence and self worth (damn uppity women!)… nothin’ but the it’s a life not a choice rhetoric. However, I don’t think that abortion should be the first-choice method of birth control, people should be better educated in contraception and personal responsibility. But, until that’s common place, until people look at preventing pregnancy or choosing adoption as the best choices, the availability of abortion is neccessary. And, it’s no one’s business, especially not some rich, religious dude who doesn’t have to support and care for the child. Put up or shut up.
FWIW, I’m all for stem cell research, always have been. From what I’ve read, often the cells can be grown. Maybe that’s a good use for IVF extras? Better to help save someone’s life than rot in a dumpster.
noxcat: yes, that would be the consistent position. I’m sure those voices are out there, but they’re not very loud.
tam: I believe the anti-abortion crowd is all about paternalistic control, and that their views have far more to do with a hatred of sex than a love of life. Ampersand said it best:
*proponents of the abortion criminalization
Ampersand’s article is worth your time.
Oh, and something else I had meant to say. I wonder if any of you share this feeling, too.
The right-to-life community feel that by defending the rights of embryos and fetuses, they are staking out a solid moral position on the absolute sanctity of human life. But in my opinion, by equating the value of my life with the value of the life of an embryo or fetus, you are cheapening the worth of my life.
I suppose the response to that would be, “You only feel that way because you hold embryos in such low esteem,” but I think the right’s position on other issues — childcare, education, their willingness to sacrifice our children in Iraq — speaks for itself. They truly do not hold human life in high esteem.
It’s all about paternalistic control. Period. Oh, sometimes they preach adoption – trust me, with a decade of clinic escorting under my belt, I’ve heard lots – but when the rubber hits the road, forget about it. They’re out of there. It’s all about control, and punishment, and enforcement of strict gender roles.
Um. Not that I feel strongly about this or anything.
So then why avoid the subject of ‘wasted’ embryos? Because presumably there’s already a man involved, calling the shots on what happens to those embryos?
It’s a wonder to me they don’t see the inanity of their position.
Maybe it’s an irrational thing. IVF creates babies and babies, like kittens and Doris Day, are nice. So IVF must be nice.
Whereas research creates Frankenstein, Dolly the Sheep and Post-It notes, which may not be Good Things – so researchers are to be regarded with suspicion.
I was interested in the post, so I did Google round, but couldn’t find any information. Do you know that pro-lifers support IVF, or are you assuming that because they don’t protest against it? I know the Catholic church opposes IVF – I don’t think I’ve ever heard what the mainstream evangelical churches say.
(Though, during my Googling, I found that the Church of Scotland supports ESCR with unused IVF embryos.)
Considering that the pro-lifers took up residence on my blog a few months ago in response to a note where I said that being harrassed by pro-lifers set up an emotional (NEGATIVE) reaction in me, one which is replayed whenever I see an ultrasound of a fetus, I find myself being a little wary about stating an opinion on it again.
Oh. But it’s on YOUR blog. OK then. 😉
I call bullsh1t on the sanctity of human life line anyway. These are not people who are volunteering in nursing homes to bring life and love ot the abondoned elderly this society creates. These are not people who are adopting children (ones who are old enough to walk and talk and argue back with you) who have been traumatized by the welfare and foster system. These are not people who are interested in creating a better quality of life for truly ill people, people who have accomplished grat things in their lives and have been struck down by Parkinson’s or other degeneritave diseases.
These are people who are ONLY concerned with the poltical cause of the embryo. Not with the mother, or the father, or the family unit into which another child will be inserted. There’s no outreach for families who are devistated by poverty, ones who psychically cannot handle another child and eventually have yet another child entered into the foster system. A system which goes on to dump seventeen year old children into our society who have been bounced from one family to another and traumatized.
That’s all ignored in favor of getting a scared teenager to make the “Right” decision to keep the pregnancy going. And then everyone walks away. Because the sanctity of HER mental health or physical health isn’t that important. As long as that baby was born.
Bullsh1t.
Of course, according to the nutjobs who visited my blog, I must be “post-abortive” to hold these views and therefore incredibly damaged by the ordeal I Must Have undergone. Yeah. Right. Whatever.
Growl.
Marianne, I found one writer who noted there had been ONE organized protest against IVF. One.
Suisan, tell us how you really feel!
I agree 100%, but I’m still intrigued with the why of it all. Why this singleminded obsession with the embryo/fetus? Is it, as one author suggested, not so much an obsession with embyronic or fetal life, but a sperm fixation? “How dare you mess with the success of my sperm!”?
I think they are focused on the fetus only because it doesn’t have a voice. They’d like the mother of the fetus to not have a a voice either, but many times these uppity women just go ahead and have their own opinions about such things.
Moral absolutist arguments work a whole lot better when the object of the argument isn’t able to pipe up and say, “Hey. Wait a minute.”
I actually could go along with a lot of what the “pro-lifers” pretend to be standing for if they would simply demonstrate the slightest concern about the embryo’s life after it is born.
This arguement reminds me strongly of the evolution/Creationist debate. The media falls right into the IDers plan when they describe evolution as “the scientific theory regarding the origins of life”, a phrase whihc the media uses over and over and over again. Evolution is NOT about the origins of life, an untestable proposition, but about the development of the complexity of forms of life. So the Creationists are now saying crap like, “Well, maybe Natural Selection can operate on species, but how do you determine when speciation occurs. And besides which, What does your stupid Evolution tell you about God’s Almighty Hand in the origin of life? Hmm? Got an answer for that, do you? Well, then. If evolution can’t describe it, then your theory must suck eggs.”
It’s the same parsing of the larger issue to focus on one ridiculous detail. Then everyone focuses on the detail. Stupid.
As you pointed out, of course the clumps of cells aren’t worth much–otherwise they’d be having fits over IVF. And QUALITY of life itself ain’t that important either. Otherwise they’d be liberating people from substandard nursing homes to provide one on one dedicated nursing care to the elderly. Hah.
I see the entire abortion debate to be an attack on the mother, who should know her place and shut up in the face of patriarchal opinion. So what if you didn’t want this baby. It’s your job to raise it, so shut up and do it. No arguments allowed.
Sigh. I really should learn to walk away from this topic. Being raised by an activist for the ERA, a vice-president of the state chapter of the ACLU, and the president of the fore-runner to NARAL has *clearly* affected me to the point where I cannot see this topic come up without foaming at the mouth.
Ugh. But it pisses me off so.
That and “horse whispering.” Dear Butcher cringes when he sees a mention of it show up on TV. “Clear the room! She’s at it again!”
Well, my experience has been that no one flushes the embryos down the drain. They freeze them for future use. Donation is possible, but very difficult, which is unfortunate. So, while some embryos may be destroyed, they are usually preserved with the intention of being allowed to realize their potential for life.
Also, the pro-life movement does attack IVF. One of the more recent articles I ran across claimed that IVF babies with birth defects were being aborted. Shock! Horror! Nevermind that those birth defects were likely not compatible with life. I.e. Trisomy 18.
Now that I’m pregnant, I am convinced that the pro-life movement wants nothing to do with saving lives. Their goal is solely sexist political polarization.
Let’s see. You have to lose, on average, two babies to incompetent cervix before most doctors will consider a cerclage. Three miscarriages before anyone will test you for a problem because ‘most’ babies are lost early on due to chromosomal abnormalities. Well, ‘most’ babies are not ‘all’ babies and I did some rough math and there are about 500,000 babies a year that die early on from potentially preventable causes. So-called prenatal care doesn’t start until week 10 or 12. There have been no major medical advances in the treatment of pre-term labor or pre-eclampsia. Our maternal and fetal mortality rate is poor compared to other developed countries. Etc…etc…etc…
Where is pro-life in all this? Nowhere to be found. Frankly, I don’t think they’ve earned the right to call themselves pro-life.
M
And another point…
While an embryo may be potential life, it’s not a baby. It’s not viable until it has implanted in the womb and shown the ability to thrive and grow.
Unfortunately, nature has a high error rate when it comes to reproduction and it would not be unreasonable to say that about 50% of embryos are not capable of life. The percentage is even higher for some infertile couples. (My fertilization rate was less than 50% although almost all of the embryos that did make it survived to freeze which is a high percentage.)
So how does anyone argue that this is the same as abortion when the embryos may not even be viable?
There are many women who go through IVF only to see their embryos die in the petri dish due to poor egg or sperm quality. IVF is not an exact science and we have not superceded nature. I imagine this makes it difficult to find a clear target. Abortion is simple by comparison. There is a baby. No doubt. The baby is aborted. No doubt. It’s an easy emotional target for people to get all hepped up about. No one has to get technical about the science.
But with IVF how do you know which couples are ‘abusing’ life and which have just learned they will never be able to create life? How do you know which couple to punish and target? How do you tell which couple is doing ‘natural’ IVF which doesn’t create so many embryos and which is wantonly trying to make hundreds of embryos (and maybe they’re doing so because out of the hundred they’ll be lucky to have two that survive)? You can’t, it’s not black and white, it’s gray, and I suspect this is one of the reasons why pro-life can’t effectively target IVF alone (notice how in my comment above they tied it to abortion, their core issue). Every couple is different. The medical history is different. The treatment is different. There is no single target.
If you’ve got a political movement that relies on whipping people’s emotions into a frenzy, IVF isn’t going to yield much because it doesn’t present a clear specific target that people can rally around. Plus, once someone starts looking at the realities of the science and the fact that these people want to have a baby, it becomes difficult to sustain to moral outrage. Abortion is a much better hot button.
M
Demented M: In terms of the implantation rates you were talking about above, it’s been shown (although I don’t have the references in front of me) that horse embryos routinely split well before implantation. My vet told me of a study she was involved in where they could track the two embryos floating through the equid horned uterus for up to a day.
The theory was that the embryos were “testing” various implantation sites, and that having two was better than one. This means, of course, that for every healthy foal born, there is a high likelihood that another potentially viable horse embryo was “sacrificed”. Apparently this has shown up in other species with horned uterus(es?). (Also explains why a litter from two different sires can gestate in the two separate horns in cats, guinea pigs, and I think rabbits.)
I heard recently that this same theory is being examined for humans — that the reason twinning may have evolved is to increase the rate of viable implantation, with the side effect that the non-implanted embryo will never survive.
I should go find this stuff written down in a paper somewhere.
Suisan:
They haven’t done any comparable human research that I know of, but your information is intriguing.
I suspect they know more about animal reproduction than human as the ethical issues surrounding animal research aren’t quite so delicate. (Animal info comes up sometimes more often on Google searches than human info.)
As it stands now, implantation in human reproduction is still a mystery and they have almost no control over whether or not a healthy embryo implants.
M
Yeah; even in less reactionary times, I can only guess how difficult that’d be to get through a review board.
Folks, thanks for grabbing the ball and running with it! Great discussion.
Re Michelle’s:
I understand your point, but I’m still not sure. I guess what concerns me is that this suggests careful consideration on the part of the anti-choice crowd, and I don’t think they’re capable of it. Perhaps they’re able to reassure themselves that all those frozen embryos will ONE day become babies . . . yeah, right.
I wonder, though, whether they intentionally avoid targeting the IVF crowd because they want access to that technology.
Well, I don’t know. I truly think it has more to do with the fact that embryo destruction is separated by time and space from the people who ‘own’ the embryos.
For example, a freestanding abortion clinic is a focal point. Everyone is there for the same reason and the day they are there is the day the abortion occurs.
Very easy target.
Embryo destruction can occur months or years after a cycle and the couple is not present. Nor is everyone at a clinic for the same reason.
Who do you harrass?
Abortion is a political hot button used to polarize people and most people are, well, stupid. You’ve got to make the outrage easy, if people have to think, it’s too hard to attract and sustain your angry mob.
And I don’t mean to be inflammatory, but I see the lies and misinformation the pro-life demographic puts out there and they are definitely not interested in primary research or evidence based anything. They just want to whip people to a frenzy and build a voting base for the next election.
Witness the recent Supreme Court ruling.
M
And another thing, I actually started my own post on the whole pro-life IVF thing and scrapped it.
But I also think they avoid direct confrontation because people who do IVF are:
Hormonal
Irrational
Angry
And on lots of drugs
Plus men are involved too and they are much more assertive than women as a general rule.
The shame of infertility is not the same as the shame (assuming) of abortion. We’d only be too happy to yell back and become aggressive.
Truthfully, for their own safety, the pro-life movement should avoid direct confrontation.
M