Time Again to Penalize the Living

I just noticed that that George W. Bush, the photo-op stand-in for President Cheney, has followed through on his threat to veto the stem-cell research bill that landed on his desk. Thank goodness we have an administration willing to go to the ends of the earth to protect the sanctity of life as represented by an all-but-discarded frozen embryo fast on it's way to being tossed out as medical waste. I'm sure millions of Americans will be sleeping easier knowing that the administration is hell bent to give a cluster of cells the full rights of citizenship while at the same time they whittle away relentlessly on the rights of the living.

Riddle for the Administration: You run into the front door of a burning medical laboratory. Fifty feet to your left, sitting on the floor crying, is an eight-month old infant. Fifty feet to your right, a freezer containing 20 frozen embryos. You have time to rescue the infant, or the embryos, but not both. What do you do?

If we as a society are happy to embrace technologies like in vitro fertilization in order to allow people to become parents who otherwise would not have this chance, is it not our duty to use well the discarded byproducts of these kind of processes? Is it not our moral imperative to make sure that unused embryos do not literally go to waste? In this, I am in full agreement with Republican Senators Orrin Hatch and Bill Frist, as well as Nancy Reagan, which is not something that happens all that often for me.