This was the first post ever on Thoughts from Kansas.

On the third anniver­sary of the deci­sion to lim­it stem cell research, Lau­ra Bush endorsed the exist­ing stem cell pol­i­cy. Lots of blog­gers, espe­cial­ly Chris Mooney, have been push­ing this as a wedge issue that the Democ­rats can win on, and right­ly so. Even the Bush­es seem to think so.

But there are just some fas­ci­nat­ing philo­soph­i­cal issues in this that get glossed over too fast as this has been politi­cized. The debate, for those join­ing us recent­ly, is to what extent stem cells obtained from human embryos ought to be acces­si­ble to sci­en­tists con­duct­ing research. Some peo­ple think life begins at the instant sperm and egg join. They think that destroy­ing an embryo — even to obtain life sav­ing cures down the road — is murder.

This gets com­pli­cat­ed because the embryos sci­en­tists want to use are pro­duced in fer­til­i­ty clin­ics. The clin­ic induces ovu­la­tion, har­vests a dozen eggs, and fer­til­izes all of them in vit­ro. They let them all grow for a while, and then implant the three or four that appear health­i­est. The oth­ers are frozen indefinitely.

“Pro-life” advo­cates see those as liv­ing beings, but seem to have no prob­lem with the prac­tice of “selec­tive har­vest,” in which, once the preg­nan­cy has reach a favor­able stage, all but one or two of the embryos are abort­ed. Nor do peo­ple who hold that blas­tu­la is equiv­a­lent to an adult human life object to those eight cell spheres being frozen for­ev­er. It’s only when some­one wants to do some­thing use­ful with them that it becomes problematic.

This bears some sim­i­lar­i­ty to a conun­drum posed by some philoso­phers about a man in a truck. He’s dri­ving along, and sud­den­ly, the brakes fail. Ahead of him is a school bus full of chil­dren, and to the side is a sin­gle child walk­ing to the bus. If he turns, he kills only one per­son, but he has made an act of com­mis­sion in select­ing that per­son to die. If he allows the truck to con­tin­ue in its course, he can feel like he isn’t respon­si­ble for killing dozens of chil­dren, because chance put them there.

If you accept a world view in which events are all part of a plan, then the school bus is in front of the truck for a rea­son, and a grand pur­pose exists in the unknow­able future for the thou­sands of embryos frozen in fer­til­i­ty clin­ics around the world. There­fore, to take a pos­tive act that choos­es between options — rather than allow­ing the clock to run out — shifts respon­si­bilty from the unknow­able mind of God to your own imper­fect human mind.

If you believe that events can hap­pen by chance alone, you have to respond dif­fer­ent­ly. If the bus is ahead of you because Tim­my, the first kid picked up in the morn­ing, tripped and slowed every­thing down, then your deci­sion to plow into the bus isn’t ran­dom, it’s an act that you choose. You bear the respon­si­bil­i­ty for your deci­sions because some­times things just hap­pen, and as intel­li­gent peo­ple, we have to respond to sur­pris­es, and accept respon­si­bil­i­ty for those responses.

The prob­lem of valu­ing poten­tial or actu­al life is an increas­ing­ly big prob­lem, and we ought to have an hon­est and broad philo­soph­i­cal debate about these issues in soci­ety. Choos­ing to use blas­tu­lae for sci­en­tif­ic research, choos­ing whether to have an abor­tion, sign­ing a liv­ing will, car­ry­ing out the orders in a liv­ing will, and mak­ing deci­sions on behalf of a per­son with­out a liv­ing will are all aspects of this ques­tion. It’s hard not to feel like there is a dif­fer­ence between stand­ing up for the life of a four cell blas­tu­la that will nev­er come to term and stand­ing up for a four year old who needs a bone mar­row trans­plant, or for an eighty four year old with dia­betes, heart dis­ease, and prostate can­cer. As a soci­ety, we have qui­et­ly and sub­tly cre­at­ed ways for the ter­mi­nal­ly ill adult to make deci­sions about their end of life. The blas­tu­la and the infant can’t decide between the paths avail­able to them. Soci­ety has to estab­lish rules or defaults, but they need­n’t be absolute. We should no more com­pell a blas­tu­la to be kept in a freez­er for­ev­er than for­bid a child with cys­tic fibro­sis to drown in her own mucus. Why not allow the peo­ple who con­tributed the egg and sperm that com­pose a blas­tu­la to release that embryo to sci­ence? In essence, exer­cise their pow­er to with­draw life sup­port and allow the remains to be used to save that CF patient, or a father who — like Lau­ra Bush’s or my moth­er’s — suf­fered from Alzeimer’s.