A minority of Americans--
those who oppose embryonic stem-cell research--hope to pass legislation promoting their notion of what life should be like. They hope to be instrumental in outlawing embryonic stem-cell research even if privately-funded.
Many of these people also want specific branches of the government to decide the fates of profoundly and permanently unresponsive individuals, like Mrs. Terry Schiavo, instead of having such decisions be personal and private. Protect all (human) life, they ardently say. Their message may sound strangely reminiscent to some men, especially Catholic men. Some may remember hearing long ago in Catholic moral education classes that masturbation is wrong largely because it wastes human seed and doesn't promote life. The lesson to be learned then was that when guys masturbate, they essentially kill their sperm, thus denying life. Given the numerous human sexuality studies over the decades that have shown virtually every adolescent and adult male admits to masturbating, it was a lesson Catholic teenaged boys obviously wanted no part of learning.
Regardless, all forms of human life are sacred we were told then. And we are being told it now, but of course, not just by Catholic educators. We ought never take a life and we should never manipulate life in ungodly, unnatural ways either. These are the cornerstone beliefs of those who say they wish to create a so-called culture of life in America. In their minds they believe they have a more enlightened understanding of culture and of life than the rest of the country.
Since today, April 12, 2005, marks the 50th anniversary of the creation of the polio vaccine (thanks to Jonas Salk), it seems worth taking a trip back to the era of our early moral educations (well, those in their 50's and 60's anyway), back to a time when Americans were gripped with fear that polio could strike their families. Let's take this trip back to see if history can tell us anything about the sacredness of each and every form of human life.
Here's the unvarnished statistics: In 1916 there was a large outbreak of poliomyelitis in the United States striking over 9,000 New York city residents alone. Attempts to stop the spread of the disease largely involved the use of isolation and quarantine. Though these measures proved ineffective, quarantines during polio outbreaks were continued for many decades. The use of the "iron lung" during the 1920's aided respiration, but the coffin-like apparatus imprisoned its patients who needed it, in some cases for life. Polio was one of the most feared and studied diseases of the first half of the twentieth century. It appeared unpredictably striking its children victims and panicking many during the epidemics of the 1940s and 1950s. At the height of the polio epidemic in 1952, nearly 60,000 cases with more than 3,000 deaths were reported in the United States. It is estimated that there are 600,000 polio survivors living in the United States. Damage to the nerves can last a lifetime and in some patients afflicted with polio they never regain the full use of their limbs. Those fortunate enough to recover more fully might have gone on to develop what is known as post-polio syndrome as many as 30 to 40 years after contracting polio. In these individuals, it appears that the damage done to the nerves during the disease causes an acceleration of normal aging, leading to faster weakening of the muscles.
There was not only the immense physical pain involved with polio (nurses have reported skin was so sensitive to pain that they could not put sheets on their sleeping polio patients), but also the pain of being shunned by neighbors and classmates. Children with polio were the Ryan Whites of the 1940's and early 1950's. Many parents would not allow their children near those stricken with polio for fear of contagion. Imagine such a childhood; imagine the emotional hurt that being ostracized must have had on America's polio children.
All this changed when medical researchers were able to culture the polio virus in the laboratory. From that foundation of scientific achievement came a better one: the polio vaccine. Live human tissue was and is used to culture the polio virus, from which the vaccine is made. Without such research, polio would have continued its ugly course in America as it does today in other, less fortunate parts of the world.
Like human tissue used in the polio vaccine research, embryonic stem-cells should not be simply tossed out, because this is not the intended purpose of a stem-cell, because in doing so a few people somehow feel we are denigrating (or taking) life. Quite the opposite. In choosing to abandon the use of embryonic stem cells for medical research we slow down the progress of finding treatments, if not cures, for a host of disabling diseases and conditions.
To my knowledge, the moral watchdogs of 50 years ago did not oppose the use of human tissue in polio research. Some nonetheless trumpeted their culture of life horn by teaching their youth that masturbation was akin to murder. But somehow this seems quaintly charming compared to today's watchdogs. While they claim to be champions of life and now in particular champions of disabled persons--arguing that Mrs. Terry Schiavo was a disabled person who they would have protected by having her feeding tube re-inserted--today's so-called culture of life watchdogs work to hurt the chance that those living with spinal cord injuries may ever use their limbs again. They squash the chance of Parkinson's disease sufferers ever walking normally, or ever holding a pen or a fork without trembling grotesquely. They kill the chance that the progressive memory loss of an Alzheimer's patient could be halted, perhaps even reversed or prevented. Are not Americans with spinal cord injuries, and Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease disabled? Have we as a nation no conscionable resolve to do everything in our power to help them return to their former selves? If polio were to rear its head again in the United States, would today's culture-of-life advocates choose not to inoculate their children with the polio vaccine on the moral high ground that live human tissue was used--a piece of sacred living tissue used not as God designed or intended, but manipulated by man for his own life-altering agenda?