The Anti-Science Left?

The Strenuous Life has long maintained that the ongoing debate over the use of embryos for scientific research was about much more than "cures." Today, Joseph Bottom from First Things dissects to the heart of the embryonic stem cell debate with laser beam precision in the Wall Street Journal.

“I have long suspected that science, in the context of the editorial page of the New York Times, was simply a stalking-horse for something else. In fact, for two something-elses: a chance to discredit America's religious believers, and an opportunity to put yet another hedge around the legalization of abortion. After all, if our very health depends on the death of embryos, and we live in a culture that routinely destroys early human life in the laboratory, no grounds could exist for objecting to abortion.”

Furthermore, now that the use of embryos is likely unnecessary for the production of pluripotent stem cells expect the secular left to cool considerably on the merit and promise of their use for alleviating human suffering. In other words, if the use of stem cells no longer serve the secular left’s primary objective their use will come under much more exacting scrutiny.