So, there’s an article in the Observer today subtly, yet not-so-subtly, standing behind Mr. Bush’s veto of the stem cell research bill. Oh, in case you want to know, you can find out who voted how by clicking here. Anyway, the author supported the ban in part by revisiting the public announcement Bush made after signing the veto, with the 18 children who were born from leftover embryos from other peoples’ in vitro (I’m not that easily grossed out, but I personally wouldn’t be too keen on carrying a child in my body whose genetic parents were strangers to me, but that’s me. . .). His statement was “these children are not spare parts.”

Well, Mr. Bush, their estimated 400-500,000 brothers and sisters are. Unless you act definitively and follow up this stem cell research ban with not only a ban on future IVF procedures, but also a bill that will forcibly implant each and every one of these 400,000-plus embryos into women of childbearing age so that they can be born, it will all be just another neocon piece of hypocrisy!!! The only difference that your veto has made is that these hundreds of thousands of embryos will either age to inviability or be destroyed without having served any purpose whatsoever.

The whole IVF/fertility enhancement thing just sends me into spasms, rolling on the floor and clutching my head because of the onslaught of gross hypocrisy from people who are selectively christian. I have to give the Catholic church props on this one in particular – the pope has, indeed, seen that if they’re going to say that life begins at conception, then they have to oppose procedures that produce spare embryos. However, your average John and Mary Bornagain don’t seem to have that sensibility. They head off to the fertility clinic and take that Clomid and make those embryos, and when the doctors say that they really shouldn’t leave all those half dozen babies in that one womb because they’ll face a lifetime of suffering from underdevelopment and premature birth, suddenly they go all “against God’s will” on us. Look, it was God’s will that you not have kids, or you wouldn’t have needed the fertility clinic, so what’s one more violation, for the good of the kids, eh? Don’t you care about them? Oh, wait – no, you actually don’t, because you’ve plopped a few more of them into the deep freeze for later, and since life begins at conception, there’s not much difference between trapping a soul for several decades in a mass of cells without sight, hearing, smell, taste, or touch, and giving birth deliberately to a disabled child – one who might not have been disabled if you’d done what the doctors told you. My brain is hurting already, and it’s not even 8AM.

OK, so we have a scorecard here – Have babies through scientific enhancement, God happy! Give babies best chance at long and healthy life, God mad! Make thousands of extra embryos and freeze them for 30 years until they’re dead, God happy! Use extra embryos for research so they do some good instead of letting them rot, God mad! If this makes my head spin, I can only imagine what it’s doing to poor God.