Stem cells

This is a letter I wrote to our editor following a desperate plea to legalize stem cell research:


Ms Gafford is absolutely right that stem cells hold great promise. They have already been used to grow a new tooth, used for blood-forming in transplants for 40 years, to treat leukemia and related bone/blood cancers, to regrow a trachea, and many other things.

However, these stem cells were all collected from consenting adults. The collection process does no harm to the donor (some cells are simply scrapped off the lining of the inside of the nose).

What Ms Gafford fails to mention in her letter is that she wants us to use FETAL stem cells. These are collected from unborn, un-consenting babies and the process kills them. This is human sacrifice to the “god of science.” It is evil. We will not succeed in doing good through evil means.

Other countries have been experimenting on these cells for years. They have come up with exactly ………. NO …….. cures or treatments for anything whatsoever. It doesn’t work.

Even if it did, do we really want to be a nation that gets her health from child sacrifice?

I have a few much better, more promising ideas: 1) Let’s do more work on cord blood and placentas. Though discarded as waste in America, they are used in traditional medicine around the world with startling results and may very well give many advantages while harming absolutely no one. And 2) Let’s put our money into learning how to prevent these diseases. Isn’t that much better than needing to cure them?

Let’s find the causes instead of killing for the cures.