Pro-Lifers' Stem Cell Position Makes No Sense

This essay appeared online at New America Media, 2006

OAKLAND, Calif.--I'm always puzzled how religious conservatives got the pro-life tag.

Many years ago when I was a young religious conservative with aspirations of becoming a theologian, I was troubled by how my fellow believers accepted as ethical the bombing of innocent civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (Forget for now that fetuses and embryos were slaughtered in the bombings, since undoubtedly there were pregnant women among the 200,000 or more dead.)

Church elders told me we bombed those civilians so that we could spare the lives of an estimated million soldiers who would die if we had to invade Japan. Sacrifice some to save the more, they said.

The same justification is used for the Iraq War, which most religious conservatives do not oppose. We have killed more than 30,000 innocent Iraqis over there to, it is claimed, protect the lives of American citizens -- current and future generations -- from death here at home.

And yet, religious conservatives fervently believe that it is unethical to sacrifice the life of an embryo -- what they consider innocent human life -- even if the sacrifice means saving a living person.

Which means that a religious conservative is a person who will not kill the unborn to save the born, but would kill the born to save the unborn.

The logic of religious conservatives on the issue of embryonic stem-cell research is perplexing. They support public policies that would limit cures for diseases which claim innocent lives. Yet a cursory overview of their Bible demonstrates that innocent life, whether born or unborn, was constantly exterminated for the greater good.

For starters, at the center of Christian faith is the doctrine that innocent blood must be shed in order to save humankind from eternal damnation. That's why Jesus is now known as the most famous human sacrifice.

I was taught that abortion is anti-Biblical, that God values the rights of the innocent unborn. But I always believed that when the Old Testament God sent the Israelites to slaughter in a frenzy the Amalekites ("...put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle, sheep, camels, donkeys...") that, as with Hiroshima, there must have been pregnant women within those city walls.

Religious conservatives don't support therapeutic cloning -- the most promising embryonic stem-cell research -- because they disagree with the concept of creating life to exterminate it. But does their God disapprove? God created life in the Book of Genesis, but by chapter six he decided to exterminate almost all life on Earth with a deluge.

Religious conservatives are often a martial lot. (Which makes sense when you consider that another fundamental tenet of their religion is that an Apocalyptic War will usher in Paradise.) Ask them if they think that maybe we should end the war in Iraq now that we've murdered 10 times the number of innocent lives lost on 9/11 and they will tell you quite sternly that we mustn't lose heart, that there is bound to be collateral damage in every "just war." But they don't see how their support for the necessity of collateral damage in just wars is just another way of saying that some innocents must be killed in order to protect many more lives.

Because religious conservatives believe that sacrificing human life can serve the greater good, they should embrace embryonic stem-cell research.

Religious conservatives have intellectually colluded with death so often -- in their embrace of collateral damage, their Biblical worldview of retribution and even their support of the death penalty -- that it is amazing to think they have passed off this pro-life canard as long and effectively as they have.

back to writing