USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20010711.0615 (On Screen): It is the nature of the political process that it seeks compromise. When facing two groups with radically opposed ideas, the political process tries to find a middle ground where each side makes some concessions and gets part, but not all, of what it wants. (It's been said that a good compromise is one that each side hates equally.) For many kinds of issues this is possible. But there are issues which do not permit compromise, or rather where a compromise solution would be vastly worse than either extreme point of view. This makes politicians extremely uncomfortable because it forces them to choose sides.

These polarizing issues can take decades or even centuries to work out. In some cases they may never work out. One example is racial or ethnic conflicts, where two groups both want the same land that both are living on. Maybe a compromise can be found but it doesn't look hopeful; usually the result is a fullscale war leading to genocide or eviction (so-called "ethnic cleansing"), or a deliberate partition.

President Bush is facing one of those no-middle-ground questions now. As mentioned here a couple of days ago, he's in the process of trying to make a decision about federal funding of research into fetal stem cells, which have the potential to cure several wide-spread and horrible diseases, but which are a considered an ethical disaster to certain groups. There is no middle ground here. And now a clinic has raised the stakes. Until now, most of this research was done using embryos which were left over from in-vitro-fertilization clinics. The procedure for IVF is to treat a woman with certain drugs which cause her to have a stronger ovulation cycle than usual. (It turns out to be an unusual use of birth control pills, oddly enough.) Just as she is nearing ovulation, she is operated on and eggs are removed from her ovaries. Then they are are fertilized outside ("in a petrie dish") and some of them will become fertilized. They are permitted to divide a few times to confirm that they are viable, and then all will be frozen. Typically there are anything from three to ten of them. After the woman recovers from the procedure, one will be thawed and implanted. If it doesn't take, then another will be thawed and used a few months later. Eventually one will take, and then the couple get the baby they want. At which point the excess embryos will be discarded, or used for research. There are biological reasons why it has to be this way: the harvesting operation can only be done a couple times on any given woman, and the embryo has to be well along in its development process before it can be implanted in the woman's uterus to result in a pregnancy. So it is inevitable that if this process is successful that it will leave unneeded embryos behind. That's where the stem cells they've been using have been coming from; they've been donated by the couples using the fertility clinics.

Except that now a clinic has deliberately created embryos for purposes of research. There was never any attempt to turn any of them into real babies; all of the fertilized eggs were converted for research purposes and all participants knew that going in. I don't see that this is ethically any different, frankly, but I can see how others might be affected by it. I have to wonder to some extent whether the clinic in question went public about this now precisely to polarise the issue further.

On this issue there can be no "compassionate conservativism". Either President Bush is conservative (and will come down clearly against this kind of research) or compassionate (and will support it fully, which I think is the right answer). There is and can be no middle ground. It's time to make a decision and to accept the fact that someone is going to be angry. (discuss)