Omniarchy and Stem Cell Research

Examining the abortion/stem cell/in vitro issue, it seems to me that both sides tend to forget that the creation of human life is a process rather than an event. It doesn't occur at either conception or birth; it occurs when a fetus is capable of sustaining its own life ex utero: viability.

Any reasonable person has to recognize that the difference between a zygote moments after conception and a fetus moments before birth is a difference of kind, not degree. Any other conclusion yields a host of contradictions.

For those who believe that human life begins at conception, how can the nature of that act effect the nature of the life it creates? Doesn't the embryo created by rape and/or incest merit the same protection of the law as the embryo created by loving parents? If the Fourteenth Amendment is to be revised from "all persons born" to "all persons conceived", the equal protection clause would mandate that any law that denied a fetus due process on the grounds of its conception would be grossly unconstitutional. The syllogism is inescapable: if human life begins at conception, then every fetus is a person, and if every person merits the equal protection of the law, then every abortion must be murder.

Furthermore, those that believe that human life begins at conception would have to resolve at least three less serious but nevertheless interesting enigmas:

1. Why doesn't any society in the world (or throughout recorded history, to the best of my knowledge) hold funerals for miscarriages?
2. Should America revise its citizenship laws to include all persons conceived in the United States?
3. When will President Bush begin celebrating his "Conception Day" instead of his "Birth Day"? (I'm sure H.W. and Barbara would get a big kick out of that one.)

Conversely, pro-choice advocates must understand that the point at which viability occurs is the point at which the fetus assumes a right to life (and health) that supercedes the mother's right to privacy and hence choice. They must spearhead legislation that would punish anyone, including the mother, that intentionally or recklessly kills or injures a healthy human fetus during the last trimester of gestation. As Supreme Court Justice Blackmun wrote in Roe v. Wade,

" ... state regulation protective of fetal life after viability ... has both logical and biological justifications."

Once they do so, perhaps they would gain a sufficient degree of moral capital to induce the more lucid "pro-life" proponents to join with them to compel the federal government to support stem-cell research.

From gamete to zygote to embryo to fetus, the laws of society must reflect the laws of nature to retain their moral validity. Equating fertilized eggs with human beings is to equate possible and existing human life. To delay or obstruct stem-cell research and in so doing deny suffering and dying Americans the results of its potentially miraculous cures in order to sustain the dogmatic orthodoxy of an archaic, erroneous and unnatural definition of human life is unconscionably cruel.