Jill Stanek has an interesting account of a confrontation between Center for Bioethical Reform Dir. Gregg Cunningham and embryonic stem cell researcher Dr. Hans Keirstead at CBR’s Genocide Awareness Project at the University of California, Irvine this week.
Hans Keirstead’s main arguments were exactly the ones used by the Nazi doctors who were doing lethal experiments on Jews. Their victims were subhuman, they were destined to die anyway, it was all legal, other countries were doing it and it would benefit all mankind to find cures for dread diseases. He was standing in front of a sign with the covers of the books quoting those exact arguments and the irony was totally lost on him. He just stood there parroting propaganda like a programmed robot.
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Then Keirstead would fall back on the usual “form and function” arguments such as a lack of “sentience,” which are so easily knocked back by reminding him that he will be rendered “insentient” when he falls asleep tonight but he will gain sentience when he awakens and his victims would gain sentience when they are born, it he doesn’t kill them first. Keirstead also derided adult stem cell research as inferior in its potential to deliver therapeutic applications but I countered that for the sake of argument, even if that were true, embryonic stem cell harvesting still kills babies.
Kudos to Cunningham for staying on point – that ESCR kills tiny human beings and is unethical, period – and not getting distracted into an ASCR vs. ESCR debate. Of course, it sounds like nothing was really accomplished as a result of the conversation (i.e. Keirstead was not at all persuaded by Cunningham’s logic). But let’s some seeds were planted, at least.