If I had a child sick and suffering with a disease, and I had a frozen clump of cells stored in an IVF clinic to whom I had donated a gamete, I would definitely love my real child more than the frozen clump.
Of course you’d love your child more! I’m going out on a limb to say you would love your child more than you would love the neighbor’s kid. But that doesn’t mean that you should be allowed to kill your neighbor’s kid to help your child - even if the neighbor’s kid has some life threatening illness and is going to “die anyway”.
What if my neighbor’s child knew he was going to die and wanted to donate his kidneys to save the life of my sick child? That’s allowed. I think using stem cells from frozen embryos that are going to be discarded is like organ donation - a noble thing that may improve the lives and lessen the suffering of people alive today.
the doctor has no basis for making that statement, and I would question his qualifications as a scientist for making it. There are no successful or even promising therapies in the works using embryonic stem cells, and the only experiments that have been tried on humans have been dismal failures, with shocking horrible results. Adult stem cells on the other hand have hundreds of successful applications and therapies. The child with kidney disease has a real hope of a successful therapy derived from adult stem cell research, and no realistic hope of anything promising from embryonic stem cell research. Therefore funding and support should go to the line of research with the only hope and promise of success, not be wasted on immoral hopeless experiments using human embryos.
Clump of cells. Norbert you have fallen big time for the lie. Educate yourself.
The neighbor’s child wanting to donate a kidney is not the same thing as your being allowed to kill him for his body parts. My understanding is that embryonic stem cell research is immoral because a human life must be destroyed (killed) to collect the cells. My argument is that a human life (embryo) is on the same level as a human life (6 year old boy) when it comes to its right to exist.
If you had a few dozen of your own frozen embryos left over in the freezer at the IVF clinic, what would you want done with them? Would you want them discarded, or would you want their cells utilized for what could potentially be curative treatment for things like juvenile diabetes, Parkinson’s, ALS, spinal cord injury, etc?
If you look at these embryos, you would see that they are undifferentiated clumps of cells.
Adult stem cells don’t have 100s of uses. They have been used for blood disorders, but there isn’t much hope that they will have use for disorders in other body systems. Embryonic stem cells we know can differentiate into any body tissue - neurons, islet cells, etc - and thus hold real hope for fixing otherwise unfixable problems like spinal cord injury. The belief that adult stem cells are equal to embryonic stem cells is a mistake.
I wouldn’t have a few dozen embryos in a freezer at an IVF clinic because I would never do IVF. And to ask me to hypothetically imagine that I could do IVF and figure out the consequences would to me be equivalent to asking what I would want to do with some money I had received from robbing a bank. It’s not something I could imagine because it’s a situation I would never be in.
That’s not true. Umbilical cord cells are more differentiated than are embryonic cells (“pluripotent” vs “totipotent,” I think), and thus hold less promise as treatment in general than embryonic cells, though certainly some use may still come of them.
You’re avoiding the question. If space aliens abducted you and removed some of your ova and fertilized them and froze them, what would you do then, if given a choice? Would you (a) discard those embryos or (b) allow their stem cells to be harvested, for the potential benefit of all humanity? This is the question.
So why the push for just embryonic? Why not start by exhausting and working with adult and cord blood cells?
Norbert limits the choices to only killing or killing, but life is a better choice. If I had a few dozen of my own frozen embryos left over in the freezer, I would want them implanted into my womb and held in my arms when they are born. And for those who underwent IVF who don’t want to raise more children, there is such a thing as “adoption” of those “IVF leftovers”, so that other infertile couples can raise those children.
That’s not a realistic question, that is a dumb scenario. Besides you forgot the other choice. Implant them and let them become children in the world to know and love and serve God.
Thank you. No wonder I had a problem answering this scenario. I disagree with both choices.
and
Maybe you should do some research into this…
There are some links here that you need to read…
And just what would happen if they were unfrozen and nurtured?