Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican majority leader in the United States Senate, is a medical professor, heart-transplant surgeon and sincere Christian, who spends much of his vacation time serving as a medical volunteer in clinics for AIDS patients in Africa. Speaking in the United States Senate on July 29, he made the best conceivable case for a bad cause – embryonic stem cell research. “I am pro-life,” declared Frist. “I believe human life begins at conception. It is at this moment that the organism is complete  – yes, immature  – but complete. An embryo is nascent human life. It is genetically distinct. And it is biologically human. It is living.”

Frist acknowledged that his position on the beginning of human life is consistent with his faith as a Presbyterian. “But, to me,” he said, “it isn’t just a matter of faith. It is a fact of science.” Quite so. Frist also observed that the embryo “is human life at its earliest stage of development” and that it has “moral significance and moral worth.” He emphasized: “It deserves to be treated with the utmost dignity and respect.”

Having said all that, Frist concluded: “I also believe that embryonic stem cell research should be encouraged and supported.”
How can that be? How can Frist purport to treat human embryos with “utmost dignity and respect,” while promoting a procedure – embryonic stem cell research – that entails the deliberate killing of human embryos?

Some proponents of embryonic stem cell research would have us believe that embryonic stem cells are harvested from so-called “pre-embryos,” who are something less than human. Frist rejects such sophistry. He noted that while it might eventually be possible to obtain embryonic stem cells without killing a human embryo, “right now, to derive embryonic stem cells, an embryo – which many, including myself, consider nascent human life – must be destroyed.” How, then, can Frist justify the deliberate killing of human embryos for the purposes of medical research? Does he, like many medical researchers and politicians, insist that embryonic stem cell research is the key to curing Parkinson’s disease, paralysis from spinal cord injuries and a host of other devastating illnesses? Not at all.

Frist said: “As a physician, one should give hope  – but never false hope. Policymakers, similarly, should not overpromise.” Given all the difficulties posed by embryonic stem cell research, he conceded that the idea that this procedure might eventually lead to a cure from some human illness “may be just a theory, a hope, a dream.”

Yet Frist insists it’s a dream worth pursuing. As a professor in the faculty of medicine at Vanderbilt University – one of the foremost medical schools in the United States – he is well aware that research on stem cells from umbilical cord blood shows considerable promise. He also knows that, so far, only research using adult stem cells has resulted in any proven treatments for human beings. Regardless, he insists: “Embryonic stem cells  – because they can become almost any human tissue (‘pluripotent’) and renew and replicate themselves infinitely – are uniquely necessary for potentially treating other diseases.”

Let us suppose that Frist is right on this last point. Even if embryonic stem cells are uniquely necessary for curing some diseases, his argument remains entirely unconvincing, because it fails to take into account that the deliberate killing of one innocent human being for the potential benefit of another human being can never be justified.

Consider the alternative: if it’s permissible to kill a human embryo for the purpose of extracting embryonic stem cells to cure the illness of a human adult, why, in principle, would it not also be permissible to kill a newborn baby for the purpose of transplanting a life-saving organ to a parent, God forbid, or to an older sibling?

The truth is that either all human life is sacred or none is. Frist is a brilliant man of manifest good will. Let us hope that in the ensuing debate over embryonic stem cell research, he can be brought around to an understanding of the self-evident truth proclaimed in the United States Declaration of Independence: that all men  – that is to say, all human beings from conception to natural death  – have been endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that the first of these is the right to life.