What Religious Liberty?
The Incredible Ever-Expanding Dead End
Anti-Cure, Anti-Life
Whose Values in
Education?
Toppling
Dominos
Anti-Christians
don't have to be Hypocrites but Many Volunteer
Intolerant Tolerance
The Emperor's
Clothes or a Cheap Tuxedo
The Myth of
Hitler's Pope, Part I
The Myth of
Hitler's Pope, Part II
Embryonic
Stem Cell Research Again
The Madness of
Secularism
"Don't Impose Your
Religion on Me"
Dictatorship of Relativism
Two Babies at Christmas
Living Will or Death
Warrant?
Court Ordered
Slow Motion Torture-Death Sentence
Men in Black
A Lot of Hot Air
The Culture War
Battles
"Stay with us, Lord"
Secular-to-English Dictionary
Moral Guidance for
Catholics in this Election
Christians
Losing America
Stem Cell Wars
Catholic
Pro-Abortion Politicians and Communion
Useful Idiots
Who Killed Jesus?
A Primer on Gay
Marriage
Whose Side are You
on?
Vouchers Revisited
Real and Fake
Cloning Bans
Broken Compasses
No Room in the Inn
Killing Fields
Revisited
Gay but not Merry
Adam and Steve?
The Battle for the Court
Victimless Crimes
More Salt, Please
The Next Big Fight
When Religion
Becomes Evil
Virginity Making a Comeback?
You've Come a Long Way,
Baby
The Incarnational
Approach
The Many Meanings of ACLU
Things Your Media Never Told
You
A Nasty Little Secret
Two Points of View on the Birth of Jesus
You Gotta Kill Them. How Else
Are They Going To Learn?
Perplexing Christmas Questions
How Do You See Christ Today?
Now that there is Another Ewe, will there be
Another You?
What is Conscience Anyhow?
Divorce of Love and Life
What Counts as a Mass?
What is a Covenant?
I Wish I had Your Faith
Are there Too Many Decrees of
Nullity?
Dutch Treats
Ecumenism
Going from Baby Doe to Granny Doe
Comments of Evangelium Vitae
The Exception Corrupts the Rule
Good Morality or
Good Medicine
Generation-X'ers Smart in Every Way But
One
A Matter of Good Breeding
Herod and Pontius Pilate at the
Polls
Hitler's Pope or Righteous Gentile?
The Unknown God
What exactly is wrong with
homosexuality?
Ideology Trumps Science, Reality,
and Common Sense
What Exactly is an Indulgence?
Infallibility and Error in the Church
Pilate Asked, "What is Truth?"
The Truth about Families
New Killing Fields
Choice of Language and Language of
Choice
A Lexicon for Our Day
Why are there so many bodies?
Marijuana, Medicine or Menace?
Medical Research and Ethics
Meditation
"You Taught me well,
Mommie dearest"
Moral Fallout
Neutral on the Wrong
Side
"These are the
Nineties After All"
Many are Wed but Few
are Married
"...Prepare him for
additional obligations"
A Useful Lie
A Partridge in a
Pear Tree
Religious Persecution in
the U.S.?
What Makes a Person a
Person?
The Point of a Point of
View
Politically Correct,
Morally Depraved
Population
Controllers out of Control
Practical Dreamers
Social Progress
through Immorality
Shall we Do Evil for
Goodness Sake?
Reason and Faith
Resurrection Glory
Same Sex Marriages?
Pearl of Great Price
"I used to be
schizophrenic, but we're all right now"
Sexual Morality
Irrelevant in Judging Public Officials?
Undesirable Side Effects
Some News is Good News
SOSSLQ's, not POSSLQ's
Spoils of Splits
Why Attend Mass
Every Sunday?
Is it All Right to Pull
the Plug?
An Appeal for Intolerance
Topics Catechetical
A Voting Catechism
A Moral Guide to
Voting
Vouchers: Has Their Time Come?
What Child is This?
What did they die of?
You are the Man
You may be a liberal
if...
Get Rid of that Worthless
Relative
Planned Un-Parenthood
Weighing Pro-Life Issues
Prior to Voting
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by Monsignor James C. Brunner |
Faith Points |
Real and Fake Cloning Bans
The justification of so-called therapeutic cloning is based on lies as indeed is everything in the abortion movement. Here are seven of them.
Lie #1. We are not killing human life.
Before Roe vs. Wade every biology textbook stated that human life began at conception when the sperm fertilized the ovum. At that point there is a separate human individual with 46 characteristic human chromosomes and with its gender already determined. Advocates of cloning would have us believe that cloned cells are only cellular life, of no more value than the cells we lose when we scratch our noses or brush our teeth. That is a lie. Those cells exist as part of an organized whole and have no existence apart from that. A cloned cell is an organized whole. Human life exists in its totality at the first cell stage. So it is a lie that we are not killing a human being in dissecting cloned embryos for their stem cells.
Lie #2. There is a distinction between reproductive cloning and therapeutic cloning.
The distinction is entirely false. Cloning does not occur only when a baby is born but when an egg has its nucleus removed and replaced with the DNA of the person to be cloned. A clone used in research is no different from one planted in a womb. Hatch/Feinstein states it is not right to clone for reproduction, but it should be permissible to clone to kill. Their bill should be called the "Clone and Kill" bill.
Lie #3. There are no viable alternatives for medical research in this area except by using "surplus" embryos from in vitro fertilization and by using human clones.
In our day we have a new set of disposable human beings—human embryos produced by the immoral method of in vitro fertilization. Typically many are produced and the surplus ones no longer desired by the parents are destroyed. Scientists of the National Institute of Health want to kill these human beings for the sake of obtaining their stem cells for the experiments. The act of harvesting embryonic stem cells necessarily kills the embryo. Extracting the inner cells from the blastocyst results in the embryo’s death just as surely as if you cut out a child’s heart or lungs. The attitude of some scientists is exactly the same as prevailed among the Nazi doctors. These persons are going to be destroyed anyhow so why should we not derive some benefit from them. This sort of attitude ignores the moral evil of using in vitro fertilization in the first place and the further immorality of exploitation of an innocent human being produced thereby. A human being is the sort of good that that may not be exploited for any reason whatever. It is not morally permissible to kill a human being in order to benefit another. A human being has the right to respect for his or her body whether it consists of one cell or several billion. Human embryos are here and now members of the human species and potentially adult human beings.
There are viable and moral alternatives to killing embryos for their stem cells. Adult stem cells taken from umbilical cord blood, bone marrow, and other tissues have shown promising results in treating diabetes, MS, heart disease, “Bubble Boy” syndrome, Crohn’s disease, leukemia and other cancers. So far not one person has been cured by embryonic stem cells while some have been made worse.
Lie #4 An embryo is not human until it is implanted in a womb.
