Adult Stem Cells Provide Little To No Help

It does not matter one bit. Killing babies is still wrong. And if not killing babies means people continue to die from old age and illness, so be it.

 

Well, killing babies is an emotional subject. I worry about people who dont think so.

You cell matter argument is worthless. There is no proof either way. But I have seen ultrasounds of what you call cell matter and I have seen the results of what you call cell matter twice. Again I worry about somebody who is so callous to human life that you believe it can be discarded to suit your own needs.

If the choice was to let my children die of disease or murder inocent children. I would let my children die and see them again someday. I would not under any circimstances murder an innocent baby.

 

Natural death by desiese and illness, old age is a part of life. Murdering babies in order to buy a few extra years on this earth is not an acceptable answer.

 

I have seen the result and they are now 4 1/2 and 1 1/2 years old. They both started out as a blastocystfetusbaby. You are telling me it would have been ok to kill them when they were younger.

 

Battled by means that did not involve murdering babies.

Murdering babies crosses the line.

 

It is both a fetus and a baby. I dont care if it has arms and legs. In 9 months it will be what I seen born as my kids. Living things dont change from one species to another when they grow. It is not a plant and becomes a baby. What you show in your picture is what a very young baby looks like.

We should not be useing them or destroying them. I want no part of either. It is wrong.

If they die naturaly then we did not murder them.

For example did you know that %100 percent of people die and are buried in the ground. So if I go out and kill a few with a knife for my own personal benifit then it is ok right. Right, same argument.

 

I am going to go home and play with the little blastocysts before they go to bed. The older blastocyst just got home from AWANAs, she is all excited to show me something. :sleeping_2:

 

There is plenty of evidence of the effectiveness of using adult stem cells as they are already providing help to people - www.stemcellresearch.org.

The idea of using embryonic stem cells has never helped one solitary person and I sincerely doubt that it ever will. Even the advocates of this idea can only say there is potential that is decades away - in essence, pie in the sky by and by.

 

MP, I would ask you for consistency. Earlier, you said,

But then later, you said,

You engaged in what you asked to be left out of the discussion, IMO.

I don't have a good answer for you on what to do with the thousands of embryos that are already formed, and are frozen. But since they have the full genetic material that a grownup has, I can't go along with the "wad of cells" definition, and the subsequent destruction of them. I've always been bothered by the large numbers of them being created. But now that they're 'made,' I'm not feeling good about killing them.

When you squash a caterpillar, are you killing a butterfly? It doesn't look or act like a butterfly yet; however, all that will make it a butterfly is contained in that living caterpillar. It is actively becoming a butterfly before its life is ended. It's life's biological end result will be a butterfly. Now granted, this analogy is not perfect--yet it makes the point, I think. And with one major added ingredient--butterflies don't have souls...they're not made in the image of God.

The other concern I have, MP, is that we link the value of an individual to their usefulness. That slippery slope scares the heck out of me. Our "usefulness" is not how God judges us. The following from my life illustrates this:

Several years ago, when I was a nursing home chaplain, I led a man named Paul to the Lord. Paul was 88 years old. He was blind, almost completely deaf, bedridden, and had severe arthritis. When I would visit with him, and when I witnessed to him, I had to lean down in his ear and holler. It took over an hour to share Christ with him. Yet he believed, and was saved.

The world might look at Paul and say, "but what good was he to anyone? He couldn't do anything." Yet God didn't tie Paul's worth to his ability to be useful, but rather his inherent value to GOD because God had made Paul, and ultimately God had redeemed Paul.

It was a great reminder to me that God does not view us in a utilitarian sort of way--and I'm very leery of looking at humans--born or yet to be born--in that matter.

 

All arguments aside, this last comment is cold.

MP,

If you did not intend to start a debate, then why on earth did you start this topic in a debate forum and open with a challenge to those who view this process as evil and murderous?

I, myself, am not exactly sure where I sit on this issue. Part of me knows that I believe in life at conception, that allowing the due course of nature (God's way) will mean that these embryos would eventually become babies. The other part knows that these embryos are marked for destruction, and in lieu of just destroying the unused embryos, they could at least be put to use in medical research. No matter what we do, even with adoption and what not, almost all of these created embryos will be destroyed. That is a simple fact.

It's a very slippery slope with something like this, with many pro-lifers such as myself not knowing what to think.

All I can do at this juncture is pray for God's guidance, and if these tests on these embryos go through, that He will forgive us if we've been on the wrong side of this issue.

 

There is a new way of obtaining embryonic stem cells without destroying the embryo. It involves removing a cell from the embryo and raising it with the "parent" embryo.

This doesn't always work to produce new stem cells, but it often does AND the embryo can continue to develop to implantation stage.

 

That sounds great! Perhaps a letter-writing campaign to our representatives to support additional research here would be in order.

Thanks for the good info, Daisy.

 

You state my point, but add calousness that I dont have. I respect and care about the elerly. It is not "they are going to die anyway, so what." It is more along the lines of death is a natural part of life and murdering babies to prolong life is unexeptable.

It is not about rights. Nobody has the right to take another life to prolong theirs. If I wanted to kill a 6 year old for his liver and you said no, are you granting him rights over me. No I never had the right to take another life. So blytoplasts have God given right as living humans. Elderly never had the right to kill them.

You can not seperate this debate from the question of when life begins, that is the heart of this debate. MP if you are right then it is ok to harvist blastoplasts. MP if I am right then we are murdering babies and useing their bodies in an attempt to prolong life.

MP if you are right then what we are doing is no different then picking plants and making pharmacuticals. If I am right then what we are doing is no different then murdering school age children to take their organs for our use.

Since there is no proof either way I think we shoud err on the side of life. There is no doubt that what you call "a mass of cells" is alive. There is no doubt that it is human, since humans procreat and can only make other humans.

I like to think about it backwards. My child was once a blytoplast (or what ever the word is) If you want to tell me that it would have been ok to kill my child if I would have done it early enought. I will never believe it, I will always consider it evil.