The second fallacy is that every embryo will be useful for providing stem cells. In the real world of laboratory science, it is often necessary to destroy 15 or 20 embryos before you succeed in getting just one embryonic stem cell line. The process is inefficient. Hence from the 11,000 embryos mentioned earlier, one could reasonably expect just a few hundred stem cell lines. Thus, the seemingly impressive number of “400,000 frozen embryos,” hides the real truth that the number of stem cell lines you could expect to get is too small to be of use in treating large segments of the population who have various diseases. In other words, vast numbers of embryos beyond those currently frozen would still be required to treat diseases, if it ever, in fact, becomes possible to treat human diseases in the future with embryonic stem cells. The push to strip-mine embryos that are stored in the deep-freeze is but the opening salvo of a broader effort to produce many more doomed embryonic humans in Petri dishes for research purposes. Canada, for example, recently announced a new policy that will permit research not only on embryos taken out of the deep-freeze, but also on freshly prepared, never frozen, in vitro fertilization embryos. Similar experimentation using fresh human embryos is also legal in a number of states throughout the United States, as long as private, rather than government funds are used to pay for the experiments.

The third fallacy concerns the idea that when embryos will be “thrown out” by somebody and are going to “die anyway”, that somehow gives me carte blanche to destroy those embryos myself for research. In point of fact, however, the unethical behavior of others can never condone immorality on our part. Somebody’s imminent death, moreover, does not create a license for us to subject them to lethal forms of experimentation. Organs, for example, may not be forcibly taken out of death-row inmates merely because such prisoners are going to “die anyway.” You suggest that embryos are mere objects, “things” for our manipulation, ultimately little more than dumpster-bound material. Representative Chris Smith, on the other hand, sets a more proper tone when he observes that it is, “…highly offensive, insensitive and inhumane to label human embryos as excess or throwaway or spare.”

To put it simply: human beings are never disposable, whether in the form of a zygote, an embryo, a fetus, a neonate, an infant, a child, an adolescent, a teenager, an adult, or a 90 year old woman. Each of us exists as a remarkable biological continuum that extends from conception until death. Our fundamental and unique value is never determined or diminished by our stage of development. Dr. Alfred Bongiovanni of the University of Pennsylvania once testified at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing in these words: “I am no more prepared to say that these early stages represent an incomplete human being than I would be to say that the child prior to the dramatic effects of puberty is not a human being.”

As fellow human beings, human embryos ought never to be the subjects of death-dealing experiments aimed only at benefiting others.

Your forth fallacy and your biggest lie. “The ultra right concerns itself with frozen embryos that will be discarded eventually but are not concerned about children as well as adults that already exist and are suffering?” I am not “ultra” anything. I am right in the center of middle America. And I will tell you this -children as well as adults that already exist and their suffering, are exclusive of the moral depravity of your thinking. To say that the people on the right are not concerned with human suffering is silly. But then, silly is as silly does.