Dear Congressman Palazzo,
If the right to life is the most important right we have, how do you feel about US forces taking the life of Osama bin Laden? Like many of us, I am sure you see it as a justifiable taking of life. So this idea of the right to life obviously has some nuance, or we would never take a human life. Given this, we often take in to account the quality of the life in question. Would you make exceptions for abortions in cases where the well-being of the mother, a woman of child-bearing age, with the aspirations and hopes of a human adult, over the life of an embryo or fetus, with no aspirations, no consciousness, no ability to feel pain? In other words, a pregnant woman and the embryo she carries may sometimes have an adversarial relationship. Should the embryo's rights always take precedence over the mother's? In which cases would they not? As to embryonic stem cell research, would you rather have frozen embryos stored until they are disposed of, or used to advance medical knowledge that can be used to decrease suffering to an unimaginable degree. I am a biologist, and I have heard all the arguments that we don't need embryonic stem cells to advance medical science. This is not true. We do.
In all, your views on these matters are based on a view that human life starts at conception. I would ask you to talk to a developmental biologist and find out what this term means in a scientific sense. If you do, I think you will find that the term is almost meaningless, and certainly not a logical place to define the start of a human. It is only such if you have some religious notion that the soul enters the noocyte at this time, which is an untestable claim. I would ask you to re-think these issues without the addition of religious dogmas which add nothing to the debate on how society should approach these important questions systematically and humanely, using evidence and reason to come to policies which advance the best possible outcomes for the most people.
Mims H. Carter
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