The personal politics of stem cells
The personal politics of stem cells
By BOB MCALISTER
Guest columnist
“Senators summoned their family ghosts Tuesday, and for a few moments they almost lived again — relatives who trembled helplessly, slowly lost their minds or withered away from incurable diseases.”
That sentence from McClatchy Newspapers sums up how and why the Senate voted to use tax dollars to experiment on human embryos. The senators made it personal.
Egocentricity, as common in Washington as cherry blossoms and crime, thrived, making objections to tax-funded experimentation on human embryos seem, well, inconvenient at most. As one senator said of his family members: “We will all die. But no one should have to die as they died.”
Most of human history has been lived with the assumption that God doesn’t give us a vote on how we die. The Senate voted against that notion.
Since exaggerated self-awareness and egoism are cool, let me say this: The legislators and lobbyists pleading for the law have nothing on me, anguish-wise.
I have lost good friends to Alzheimer’s. The wife of one friend had to move her husband from a first-rate facility to one of lesser quality because she ran out of money. The director at the new facility counseled her not to visit her husband every day, suggesting that she try to make a life for herself. She replied: “My husband is my life.”
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