By: Amber Fearnside

  For the first time in our history, it is acceptable for medical researchers to kill one human being to help save another.  Ultimately, what lies at the heart of this debate is our view of the human embryo.  The central question in this debate is simple; Is the human embryo a person or a piece of property?  If unborn people are living beings, they have dignity and worth, and they deserve protection under the law from harm and destruction.  If, however, unborn persons are a piece of property, then, they can be destroyed with the consent of their owner. 

  Pro life ethicists, doctors, and other concerned Christians argue that to destroy a human embryo for the purposes of research is nullified by the fact that a human being is destroyed in the process.  Pro life Christians believe that human life is made in the image of God.  "For You formed my inward parts; You wove me in my mother's womb.  I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Wonderful are Your works, and my soul knows it very well.  My frame was not hidden from You, when I was made in secret and skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth.  Your eyes have seen my unformed substance; and in Your book were all written the days that were ordained for me, when as yet there was not one of them.  How precious also are your thoughts to me, O God!" Psalms 139: 14-17.  As such, human life must be protected and treated with dignity from conception until natural death.

  Many politicians are wrong to say it is not as bad as abortion, but it is also wrong to say that it is worse.  The abortion-related equivalent of embryonic stem cell funding would involve using taxes to pay women to abort thier children, as part of scientific experiments aimed at distant and uncertain cures.  Furthermore, all stages of life are stages of the same being.  Each of us was once a human embryo.  Each of us is just a human embryo that has grown up.  And we have been alive the whole time we have been growing and developing-that is, since fertilization.  If one of us had been killed at any time before we were born, a human life would have been lost.  So abortion and lethal research on embryos are equally bad.