stem cell research

Micrówave wrote:

"If you have a 3rd month miscarriage in a Catholic hospital they won't give the embryo an emergency baptism and bury it on a Christian cemetery - they will throw it into the biohazard trash can"

Your source for this?  Or is this just a slight case of slander?

(I'm sure this will go unanswered.)

====================================

Do you know anyone who had a burial for a fetus in the first trimester?

It's not slander - it's the truth.  It is standard practice to safely dispose of the fetus after an abortion.

It's really amazing that the people who are anti-abortion are usually also pro-war.  It's ok to send someone off to death, as long as they're over 16.  But if they're in the womb, suddenly it's a crime.

FriedChicken wrote: I don't understand why religious people think doing stem cell research is meddling with their gods plan. While removing a tumour, that was able to grow there because of their gods blueprints, isn't.
I didn't mean stem cell research specifically is playing God, but i do think making designer babies is.  In my (un-educated) opinion, it risks ending up with a race of engineered 'perfect' humans with enhanced traits and 'normal' humans which will be the duds.  I don't think seeking healing is an ethical issue as we have an instinctive will to live, and promoting life is kind of highlighted in the Bible.

Sir GH wrote:

It's really amazing that the people who are anti-abortion are usually also pro-war.  It's ok to send someone off to death, as long as they're over 16.  But if they're in the womb, suddenly it's a crime.

Yeah, i never got this either. 
*I'm also anti-war.  Well, at least... I am in theory, but please don't ask me what i think people should have done about Hitler, because i really don't have an anti-war way around that.

Sir GH wrote: Do you know anyone who had a burial for a fetus in the first trimester? It's not slander - it's the truth.  It is standard practice to safely dispose of the fetus after an abortion. It's really amazing that the people who are anti-abortion are usually also pro-war.  It's ok to send someone off to death, as long as they're over 16.  But if they're in the womb, suddenly it's a crime. ========================================= While slander isn't the word I'd have chosen it's certainly not 'the truth' either.  Miscarried children at any stage who are no longer alive are not baptized because baptism is a sacrament for the living, not because the remains are not valued as human life.  Canonical law actually lays out procedures for this situation and permits anyone to perform the rite of baptism in an emergency where cessation of life is suspected to be imminent in a miscarriage.  If there is doubt as to whether the child is alive a conditional baptism may be performed.  Catholic hospitals no longer bury miscarried remains on their grounds (they used to) because modern civil practices separate the roles and rituals around death, and thus tissue from a miscarriage can be handed off to funeral homes and then cemeteries where the family wishes it.   Similarly, families may absolutely request a mass and attendant rituals.  They aren't required to do any of this, and it wouldn't be very merciful if they were given the very personal nature of that loss and grief.  Either way, whether the lost child is buried or handled by the hospital it's irrelevant to the underlying principle of life beginning at conception or the dignity and value that believers accord it.  I find this miscasting of the facts rather ironic. If the Catholic Church deserves criticism around right to life and related issues it certainly isn't because of the loose or hypocritical application of them.  It's because of a too encompassing and too rigid application as seen through things like church policy on birth control, life saving condom use, and abortion under no circumstances.

I have to disagree, Gratefulfan. First of all in my area of life aborted fetuses were never buried by hospitals anywhere . It is forbidden to bury anybody anywhere except for the designated cemeteries - you cannot even bury your cat in your garden. Secondly, neither the Catholic church nor any other hospital ever considered an aborted fetus as human life - fetuses have always been treated like a part of the mother's body like for example a removed appendix and not like a human being that deserves respect. I mentioned it because for me it always showed that there was no social consensus about "life beginning with conception". An aborted fetus is in fact a part of the mother's body and unable to live outside the mother's body - that is a very important difference between a still born child and a lost fetus. The still born child will be blessed by the church and buried in sacred ground (or on a cemetery in civil society). Only when it comes to legal abortion churches and other anti-abortionists all of a sudden claim that there is a social consensus about human life beginning with conception. In my opinion that is not the case at all.  Most people- even a vast majority of Catholics - believe that the rights of the pregnant woman to decide about her own body must be recognised and appreciated by laws considering legal abortion.

I think that the discussion about ethically complicated issues like stem cell research , pre-implantation diagnostics, abortion laws, IVF etc must be honest and should not be burdened with ideological dogmas. If there were a clear, ethical opinion which is valid for everybody we would not have so many different laws. For example in many European countries preimplantation diagnostics is allowed while it was forbidden in Germany until just a few weeks ago. Surrogate mothers are allowed in the USA but forbidden in many other countries, Germany also forbids the implantation of  another woman's fertilized egg while the use of other men's semen is allowed - there is a very strange legislation struggling to catch up with scientific progress. Lawful limitations of what is scientifically possible are definitely necessary but the discussion should be calm and not hysterical with all the horror stories about designer babies and Frankenstein test tubes.

YourValentine wrote:

the discussion should be calm and not hysterical with all the horror stories about designer babies and Frankenstein test tubes.

Do you think it will ever be possible that we will get to that point?  I have friends who read the most emotive, dramatic, horror-story filled and not very well backed up articles to say that they shouldn't vaccinate, i have friends who follow really far oout conspiracy theories, and i just wonder will we ever get to where society CAN discuss without half-educated people screaming out their un-founded beliefs as scientific fact.  With regard to the anti-vaccination article, i tried to explain to them that when someone has to use lots of exclamation marks, bold print, and call on their 'many years of experience' as a doctor without actually using scientific research, or anything that can be quantified or checked by another person, then perhaps we should be a little cautious about their claims.  But apparantly my aversion to hyped up badly written articles by obscure doctors who claim specialist knowledge without any evidence to back it up was a sign that I'm indoctrinated by the culture, closed minded and not able to see 'outside the box' or understand any article which goes against popular opinion.
Or something like that.
I hope someday we will be able to have calm discussions about big issues, but i really don't see that day coming any time soon.

This is one that doesn't rest on your opinion or mine YV.  There is copious independent and explicit documentation relating to the Church's view of miscarried children and their status as human beings. The subject has been the focus of Catholic theologians many times over the years and has produced evolution in canon law, the development of catechism to provide comfort to grieving families, the conditional extension of Catholic funeral and burial rights to the unbaptized remains if the parents intended to baptize the child, and an amended funeral mass for a child, among other things. Google the relevant terms and you'll find any number of accounts of families who have had some combination of funerals/burials/blessings/ceremonies for the remains of early miscarriages.  That families don't have to do any of this and can just allow the hospital to treat the loss as medical waste doesn't subtract from the fact that the Church is fully prepared in policy and in practice to provide a funeral and burial in these situations where the family desires it, nor does it subtract from the fact that the Church views the child at any stage of development as a human being regardless of the way the remains are dealt with.  Effectively arguing that a burial and an impossible baptism should be the standard for being credibly adjudged human is no less arbitrary than deciding that humanity happens at conception.  This article from the newspaper of the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago illustrates one family's experience and the way the hospital and cemetery and other supporting agencies work together in that region: http://www.catholicnewworld.com/cnwonline/2009/0705/1.aspx With regard to the larger questions in the thread, I think the best word for abortions and the destruction of embryos for research and similar issues is the word consequential.  'Consequential' does not say anything about whether an action should or shouldn't take place, but it reminds us that there is a cost, and that the cost of one path in any given situation regarding potential human life is the other one.  I of course don't want to live in a world where women cannot control their own bodies or where religion strangles science, but neither do I ever want to lose sight of the consequences of  human progress on any front.  Virtually all the pressure in our society is forward and upward, and we've learned that vigilance is necessary.  We know that tech companies for example can lose sight of our privacy in the hunt for rapid development and an edge, and so we push back and demand caution and accountability.   In the same way, scientific advancement and progressivism need their own governor in the form of ethics  Scientists push forward and other voices push back.  Whether those voices come from some religious organization, or from the men's reproductive rights side, or some other secular interest is less important to me than the simple fact that they are there.  To me, it's a significant part of what gives me the privilege of liberal thought at all.

The link you posted describes a situation which may be routine in US Catholic churches but not in Europe. We have no "unmarked common graves" in which remains are buried for which there is no legal provision - with or without the consent of the woman who had the miscarriage. I totally resent the way in which the Catholic doctors and nurses in the article equal miscarried and stillborn children like there is no difference when there is the huge difference that the stillborn child could have lived outside the mother's body had it not died during or before birth. This ignores the whole moral dilemma of women who choose abortion: that the embryo is not an individual but also an integral part of a woman's body and therefore the mother is the only one who can decide if she wants the pregnancy to continue or not.

Of course there must be discussion and of course there must be legal limitation of the scientifically possible. The discussion should not be dominated by money interests on the one side and the strive for ethical domination ot the other side. In my experience most people have some sort  of a moral compass and although the laws are not always what everybody wished for we often come to compromises with which most people can live. After all nobody is ever forced to have an abortion, pre-implantation diagnostics or medical treatment based on stem cell research. If there were a public resentment against stem cell research (for example) it would not prevail, just like animal experiments in the cosmetics industry which are less these days because people just do not want it.

catqueen wrote: YourValentine wrote:

the discussion should be calm and not hysterical with all the horror stories about designer babies and Frankenstein test tubes.

Do you think it will ever be possible that we will get to that point?  I have friends who read the most emotive, dramatic, horror-story filled and not very well backed up articles to say that they shouldn't vaccinate, i have friends who follow really far oout conspiracy theories, and i just wonder will we ever get to where society CAN discuss without half-educated people screaming out their un-founded beliefs as scientific fact.  With regard to the anti-vaccination article, i tried to explain to them that when someone has to use lots of exclamation marks, bold print, and call on their 'many years of experience' as a doctor without actually using scientific research, or anything that can be quantified or checked by another person, then perhaps we should be a little cautious about their claims.  But apparantly my aversion to hyped up badly written articles by obscure doctors who claim specialist knowledge without any evidence to back it up was a sign that I'm indoctrinated by the culture, closed minded and not able to see 'outside the box' or understand any article which goes against popular opinion.
Or something like that.
I hope someday we will be able to have calm discussions about big issues, but i really don't see that day coming any time soon.

Of course we can have such discussions :-) Luckily, the people who scream the loudest are usually not in a position to make decisions for other people. Luckily, you still need a minimum of education to get in a position in which you have any influence, so the bloggers may make a lot of noise but they do not make a lot of impact. When you look back into our history you can see that the progress we made as a civilized society in the last 70 years is simply breath taking. 100 years ago the death penalty was very common in Europe - today no European country still has it. Only 50 years ago homosexual men were thrown into jail - today we have gay marriages and gay men are ministers or famous rock stars with children. Only 100 years ago women were second class citizens with no voting rights. Today  women are presidents, chancellors, CEOs and have equal rights in every field of life (although we still earn less!). We do have an open, liberal and democratic discourse and everybody can voice their opinion and nobody must go to church on Sunday in order to be respected by their fellow citizens. No minority can terrorize the public with views that are only meant to exercise power over the faithful, the uneducated, the women, the poor, the racial minority or the gays. We can achieve a lot as a society when we do not take our achievements for granted and take part in the discourse instead of leaving it to the bloggers to scream and shout :-)

YourValentine wrote: catqueen wrote: YourValentine wrote:

the discussion should be calm and not hysterical with all the horror stories about designer babies and Frankenstein test tubes.

Do you think it will ever be possible that we will get to that point?  I have friends who read the most emotive, dramatic, horror-story filled and not very well backed up articles to say that they shouldn't vaccinate, i have friends who follow really far oout conspiracy theories, and i just wonder will we ever get to where society CAN discuss without half-educated people screaming out their un-founded beliefs as scientific fact.  With regard to the anti-vaccination article, i tried to explain to them that when someone has to use lots of exclamation marks, bold print, and call on their 'many years of experience' as a doctor without actually using scientific research, or anything that can be quantified or checked by another person, then perhaps we should be a little cautious about their claims.  But apparantly my aversion to hyped up badly written articles by obscure doctors who claim specialist knowledge without any evidence to back it up was a sign that I'm indoctrinated by the culture, closed minded and not able to see 'outside the box' or understand any article which goes against popular opinion.
Or something like that.
I hope someday we will be able to have calm discussions about big issues, but i really don't see that day coming any time soon.

Of course we can have such discussions :-) Luckily, the people who scream the loudest are usually not in a position to make decisions for other people. Luckily, you still need a minimum of education to get in a position in which you have any influence, so the bloggers may make a lot of noise but they do not make a lot of impact. When you look back into our history you can see that the progress we made as a civilized society in the last 70 years is simply breath taking. 100 years ago the death penalty was very common in Europe - today no European country still has it. Only 50 years ago homosexual men were thrown into jail - today we have gay marriages and gay men are ministers or famous rock stars with children. Only 100 years ago women were second class citizens with no voting rights. Today  women are presidents, chancellors, CEOs and have equal rights in every field of life (although we still earn less!). We do have an open, liberal and democratic discourse and everybody can voice their opinion and nobody must go to church on Sunday in order to be respected by their fellow citizens. No minority can terrorize the public with views that are only meant to exercise power over the faithful, the uneducated, the women, the poor, the racial minority or the gays. We can achieve a lot as a society when we do not take our achievements for granted and take part in the discourse instead of leaving it to the bloggers to scream and shout :-)

Thanks, i needed to hear that.  :)  I was going to say i really hope you're right, but I guess as you pointed out, history does show that we are changing.  I just hope that with the sheer volume of opinions out there that the discourse doesn't get drowned out.