• 4/19/2007
  • Princeton, NU
  • Jason Sheltzer
  • DailyPrincetonian.com

It is quite strange to me how in this country, Republicans have always been considered to be the party of “family values” and “morality.” Republicans want to end social welfare programs, criminalize homosexuality and institute a system of forced-childbirth for our nation’s women. This has never struck me as particularly moral.

Liberals, meanwhile, care about combating the spread of global poverty, ending climate change and raising the minimum wage. These are true moral concerns.

Two recent controversies have underscored the hypocrisy in the Republican position. The first debate concerns the new HPV vaccine. It’s an indisputable fact that mandating the HPV vaccine would save thousands of lives. Yet, conservatives groups like Focus on the Family have led the opposition to mandatory vaccinations, arguing that it encourages sexual promiscuity in young women.

This is just stupid. First of all, there’s absolutely no evidence supporting that claim. Moreover, even if the vaccine did encourage promiscuous behavior, ask yourself what’s worse — a sexually active 16-year-old or an 18-year-old with cervical cancer?

The second, more recent example of conservative immorality comes from the debate over human embryonic stem cells. President Bush has declared his intent to veto a bill passed by Congress that would provide federal funding for stem cell research. His justification is that it “crosses a moral line” that he finds “troubling.”

Bush is right about one thing — the bill does cross an important “moral line,” though not the one that he’s thinking of. This bill is a good heuristic to separate those who truly care about “the right to life” and “the dignity of the human being” from those who simply blather on about human dignity without ever acting to improve it.

Stem cells may provide dozens of therapeutic benefits, from treating heart disease to curing diabetes. There is no reason, moral or otherwise, to oppose further research into this area.

Let me be perfectly clear about where these stem cells come from: They don’t come from aborted fetuses. They don’t come from embryos created solely for the purpose of destroying them. Instead, these stem cells are harvested from excess embryos created for infertile couples by normal fertility treatments. During the in vitro fertilization process, dozens of embryos are created, but only a few are ever implanted. The rest are either frozen or destroyed (less than 0.001 percent of frozen embryos in the United States have been adopted by the “Snowflake Babies” program, and they stand a very low chance of survival upon implantation). The bill passed by Congress would allow couples with fully informed consent to donate their excess embryos for research that receives federal funding.

The choice is clear. There are currently about 400,000 frozen embryos in fertility clinics across the United States. They can stay locked in a freezer for all time, worthless and forgotten, or they can be used, with the donors’ consent, in lifesaving scientific research.

This is exactly what the federal government should be doing — devoting money toward treatments that could help millions of people. But President Bush cares more about posturing for his conservative base under the guise of “defending the sanctity of human life” than he cares about actually saving the human life in existence.

Liberals can regain the moral high ground by harping on these examples of Republican hypocrisy. With a concerted effort, we can move ethical debate in this country away from non-issues like “the immorality of sex in unmarried couples” and “the innate value of an eight-cell blastocyst” and toward subjects that are truly important.

About the author:
Jason Sheltzer is a molecular biology major from St. Davids, Pa. He can be reached at [email protected].