The Right's Strange Approval of In Vitro Fertilization

The Carpetbagger Report brings up a subject I've been wrestling with since the president's patently absurd (a word Dubya likes and actually uses correctly) "snowflake babies" speech last week.

Here's a group that wants to save every embryo ever conceived, and yet they love the idea of medical science creating a big batch of embryos for every client and then deep freezing them at a not unsubstantial cost, with many of those embryos never seeing the light of day or the warmer climes inside of a uterus.

While the prez would like to see all the "snowflake babies" adopted, there's really no warmth and kindness there. You see, what can and sometimes does happen to those unused embryos is that they're used for stem cell research, something the American public and most of the rest of the world embraces but the extreme right gets hives over. Better those frozen mini life forms remain in deep freeze or even destroyed rather than let someone - except an ill member of the right, of course - benefit from that life. Particularly, the extremists keep saying, "I don't want my tax dollars used to destroy those babies!", code for "I don't want poor people benefiting from something that I should be able to have myself if I want it."

Ah, but my tax dollars are used to fund lots of programs I don't believe in. Bet you face the same thing. I despise the fact that my tax dollars pay for Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, a "cooked" war or two, for locking up "personal use only" drug users rather than big-time distributors of far more deadly drugs, for imprisoning Martha Stewart but not Kenny Boy Lay, for funding abstience education but not teaching kids who will eventually have sex how to keep themselves safe from STDs and unwanted pregnancies, and on down the list. But apparently, only the extreme right get to pontificate about where their tax dollars should go. The rest of us can go to hell, both literally and metaphorically.

The hypocrisy is astounding here. For example, the Pope (most of them) regularly criticizes any medical treatment that is based on using other forms of life, like an embryo. But several recent Popes have benefited from the use of such to continue to live as long ago as the Pope before the John Pauls who received monkey gland injections that requires taking the life of a primate closely associated to humans. Oh wait, I guess that life doesn't matter.

And that whole "this life is important but that one is not" is at the core of a whole slew of the extreme right's convictions. They're really fascinated with embryos while not wanting their tax dollars to fund programs designed to help those embryos once they become fully-cooked babies, and then children, and then young adults. They're fine with frozen embryos staying frozen and wasted, but not if those wasted embryos are used to fund general research to benefit all of humanity. But, if they can benefit from stem cells themselves, they're right there to muscle others out of line.

I'd like to believe that the general public is ultimately going to get as fed up over this nonsense as many of us already are. But time will tell. Perhaps once the extremists have completely destroyed the public schools, science, health care, etc., the general public will wise up and realize that a small percentage of the population wields undue - and unwise - political influence.