My Word for August 9, 2001

Let's break down this stem cell debate that seems to have consumed most of Pres. Bush's Texas vacation, and some time before.

If couples involved in fertility procedures end up the owners of extra embryos, if there can be ownership in these kinds of things, the couple has some choices to make.

They can keep the embryos on ice, procrastinating about what to do, until the couple gets old and dies … and then some lab scientist will dump the embryos.

Or they can not procrastinate, and dump the embryos immediately.

Or they can find a willing womb, some woman who wants to have a child. That's a bit messy because it means the couple's own child will be running around with someone else. And families have messy enough relations already.

Or the couple can donate the embryos to guys in white coats.

What the guys in white coats do is remove stem cells — the pot of gold at the end of the medical rainbow. From these stem cells, they can develop a zillion dollar cures for people like Christopher Reeve, who will pay to the nth for them.

It is a given that stem cells will lead to cures. It is a given that embryos who don't have a willing womb won't end up being people. It is a given that there are towering choices to make about tiny, tiny clusters of cells.

I think this embryo is human life. It may not be a person yet, but it is a human life and it has rights — property rights to its own stem cells. The couple who allegedly owns these embryos doesn't have the right to tell the guy in the white coat he can rob that embryo of the most important thing that embryo owns: the cells that will make its entire array of human organs, brain to colon, soup to nuts.

You know what I want to see? I want to see those embryos with a lawyer, and I want to see these guys in the white coats sued.

Who says they can just pilfer somebody's stem cells? Who gave them the right to walk up to an embryo minding its own business and steal from it the very thing that would make it a person?

These stem cells are money. They are the property of that embryo, not anybody else. You can't steal somebody's heart or liver or eyeballs. Why can you heist their stem cells?

I'm not kidding. These embryos should, to borrow a phrase, sue the bastards!

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