IGM The Big Stem-cell Anouncement

Inter-Galactic Memo
To: All Personnel

Fr: W. Leavitt, Crack political hack (I just liked the way that sounded)

Re: The Big Stem-Cell announcement



Well, the big day has finally arrived; President Obama reversed Bush’s Executive Order which forbade using federal money for fetal stem-cell research. Lots of people cheering, lots of people booing. Most people have no clue either way, having long ago glued ear-buds into their heads and followed the Guru Leary’s advice, albeit in a different idiom than Tim envisioned.
So according to the latest Executive Order, federal money can now be used for fetal stem cell research. All is well in the universe again.
We might want to clarify a few things however. According to countless headlines, some people seem to think there was a ban on stem-cell research, or at least a ban on fetal stem-cell research. You know, because that mean, election-stealing, Bible-thumping George Bush hated sick people, remember?
Actually, there was a ban on using federal money for the research, that was all. There was no ban, ever, on fetal stem-cell research, which has been underway and going strong for years in labs that don’t use federal money. There has been no shortage of either money or research in these labs. Billions have been spent and will continue to be, either donated, or in R&D money from private-sector corporations.
So why the big fanfare about the end of the ban? Obama is making it sound like some kind of dam will be breaking and now new funding will be flooding the halls of research labs everywhere. New miracle cures (his word) are right around the corner now. Michael J Fox will be back on television by summer, and the lady down the street will be out of her wheel chair and turning cartwheels in a few hours.
Can you say dis-in-gen-u-ous? Fetal stem cell research has been going strong for well over a decade now. No earth-shaking news to report. No breakthroughs. Progress is being made. Michael (whom I just love, he’s so talented, don’t you think?) will have to stay retired a tad longer.
So what did President Bush’s ban accomplish? Well, for one thing, it forced scientists to be creative. I’ve been following this for several years now and at least three times a year we’ve had an announcement of a breakthrough in alternative methods of finding, using, or producing viable, un-differentiated stem cells. So we have about a dozen sources besides a fetus.
Well then, what’s the big deal about the reversal of the ban? A couple things actually. One is the aforementioned propaganda blitz, making Obama look like the Great Liberator, freeing science which had been shackled by the mean, nasty Bush. Nonsense. Another is the left’s irrational attachment to abortion as a symbol of equality, solidarity, and women’s rights. A commitment to non-fetal stem-cell research would have been seen by the left as a weakening of the mantra that easy access to an abortion is a fundamental right, which will tolerate no threat to its primacy. Nothing can be allowed to weaken the necessity of abortion. Fetal stem-cell research is of paramount importance to the left. It gives scientific and medical validity to the practice of abortion. Never mind that it is completely unnecessary for the research to continue.
And no one anywhere would ever have the poor taste to question the mighty and hallowed halls of science, right? They have all the answers! They never get it wrong! (Except for that thing about the arrowheads, and the whole ozone scare, and anthropomorphic green-house gassing, and eugenics, and don’t forget major parts of Newtonian physics, and all those announcements about having discovered all there is to discover, oh, and the impossibility of flight and . . . well you get the point) Why, who in their right mind would ever suggest that fetal stem-cell research might someday ‘progress’ to fetus-farming? Not me! I certainly can’t envision women getting pregnant again and again in order to let doctors abort their fetus and purchase it for the labs, can you? Actually, we already have a name for that. It comes from that classic sci-fi novel, Dune, where clones are custom-engineered and grown by the Bene Tleilax in Axlotl Tanks, which are assumed for three books to be high-tech apparatus of some kind, but turn out to be human females in permanent coma’s, their bodies attached to nutrient lines and monitoring devices. Don’t think it can happen? Watch.
Once again, the politicians in power are doing the old Texas Side-Step. Remember Roosevelt promising us up one side and down the other that the new social security number would never be used for anything other than social security issues? Absolutely never for identification purposes? Or how Nixon promised he would never escalate the Viet Nam war? Or bomb North Viet Nam? Or Cambodia? Or Jimmy Carter promising he had a set? And now they’re promising us that abortions will never be turned into an industry. No, no, no! the fetus will never become a commodity. Shall we start a betting-pool in honor of President Obama? I’m putting ten bucks on 2015 as the year abortion companies, whose purposes will be the wholesale harvesting of otherwise viable fetuses, are traded on Wall Street.