Sure, that title is a big stretch. It's even bigger than the 'pro-life' argument equating contraception with the murder of blastocyst-Americans. But only a little bit bigger.
Rick Perry deserves the title "Governor Ultrasound" as richly as Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell. But there's a lot more hypocrisy involved, and plenty to make me question Perry's judgement about medicine in general.
[Caution -- snark in questionable taste below the fold.]
I hadn't made the connection until I saw this story by Todd Ackerman:
http://www.mysanantonio.com/...
Last July Perry had a back operation by Dr. Stanley Jones, an orthopedic surgeon in Houston. I can't say why Perry picked Dr. Jones, but it could well have been because Jones reinjects adult stem cells from patients as part of the procedure in some cases, including Perry's. Celltex, the company that processes and stores stem cells, "...has stored the stem cells of more than 100 people so far," and "estimated doctors have reinjected cells in 40 to 50 of those people." This got back in the news because a bioethicist at the University of Minnesota, Leigh Turner, has called on the FDA to investigate Celltex.
Whether the FDA has the authority to regulate such procedures is unclear. For many years surgeons have 'borrowed' body parts of patients for other uses in the same patient - skin grafting, and harvesting veins from a heart patient's legs to use as heart bypass grafts are common examples. To my knowledge, nobody asked the FDA's approval before first trying those procedures. But when the "processing" of donated cells involves using drugs, and those cells are put back in humans, I think the FDA has authority and should exercise it.
Meanwhile, I question the judgement of someone who probably sought out a surgeon who includes this highly experimental step in his back operations. That would reduce my respect for his judgement about medical matters -- if it weren't zero already.
Then there's the matter of the 'developmental potential' of those stem cells. With the right treatment, could they have grown into clones of Rick Perry? (I know, that's a scary thought. Remember the movie "The Boys from Brazil"?) The anti-abortion faction might draw the 'distinction' that these are adult stem cells, not embryonic ones. I don't accept any significance in that distinction -- it's just harder to get an adult-derived stem cell to grow into a full fledged clone than an embryo-derived one. That's a difference in degree, not a qualitative difference. What's more, I think it would be hypocritical of anyone to draw that distinction who also equates a blastocyst to a 'snowflake child'. And that's exactly what the anti abortion crowd has done.
Come to think of it, the "right treatment" for those future clones of Rick Perry to allow them to develop would include being implanted in a uterus. Gee, whose uterus? I wonder if somebody is thinking of putting them on those vaginal ultrasound probes. Maybe Texas will pass another law requiring some post-abortion repeat ultrasound as a cover for doing that. After all, if the state can dictate what a woman can't do with her reproductive organs, why shouldn't it also dictate what she has to do? Oh yeah -- to the extent that laws prohibit abortion, the state is already doing that. Why shouldn't women have to carry Rick Perry clones to birth, rather than the children of some random rapist?
So each of those stem cells just might have been able to grow up to be a clone of Rick Perry. But by injecting them into (the currently living) Rick Perry's back, they were all aborted.