Stem-cell reporting: Editorializing rhetoric

By Dr. Wes Wright

As one who has always believed that reporting involves setting forth the facts of an issue, I was appalled to see that reporting has devolved into editorializing on the issue of embryonic stem-cell research at the Aug. 17 rally. This editorializing had nothing to do with the facts or the science of the matter. Accusing the rally as an exercise in "pro-life rhetoric," one could not but be struck by the fact that the reporting was full of rhetoric versus reporting ("worries versus hopes").

In an effort to set some of the reporting rhetoric straight, I offer the following:

Fact: Those opposed to this amendment have no concerns that "live-birth carbon copies of human beings" are what is up for discussion. This is an illogical straw-man argument.

Fact: The language of this amendment opens up and indeed seems to require that state money, our tax dollars, be used for research cloning, contrary to the reported story. One need only read the language of the amendment to see that this is the case.

Fact: Dr. Bill Neaves, president and chief executive officer of the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, resorts to rhetoric rather than logic by insisting that the view that the embryo is human "is based on religion, not science." Such a view is the well-established scientific view. All humans do, in fact, begin as embryos. And so Dr. Neaves falls into the genetic fallacy of labeling the source of an idea rather than evaluating its substance. In fact, this seems to be the fallacy of the entire piece.

Fact: That Dr. Neaves claims to be "a born-again Christian" who has "studied Scripture carefully and finds no basis for believing the research he advocates is wrong" speaks more to Dr. Neaves' poor study habits than to this issue.

The issue for those opposed to this amendment is not that we are opposed to the research and finding of new cures for diseases such as spinal-cord injuries. We all hope for such cures. The issues is a moral one, the matter of life and death. We do not believe it is just, right or morally permissible to take one life to benefit another. As the scientific definition of life tells us that the fertilized egg is the very first stage of human life, we find it morally unjustifiable to experiment on and take such a life to benefit another. If human life has no value at its earliest stages (in this case, up to the 14th day of development), then it has no value at all.

And last, if this amendment is as benign as these few seem to indicate, why the subterfuge? Why the redefining of terms (for example, cloning is defined as the process of implanting the blastocyst in a uterus rather than how is has always been defined, "somatic cell nuclear transfer)? Why the misinformation?

Why not tell us straight that some want to amend the Missouri Constitution to allow and indeed fund research cloning? Perhaps the reporting should have focused on truth rather than rhetoric.

Dr. Wes Wright is senior minister at Mount Auburn Christian Church in Cape Girardeau.