Subject: Cal Thomas: President Reagan Would Have Opposed ESCR
Source: Los Angeles Times Syndicate; July 20, 2001

Cal Thomas: President Reagan Would Have Opposed ESCR

[Pro-Life Infonet Note: Cal Thomas is a nationally syndicated columnist
and respected pro-life author and media personality. "The Wit and Wisdom
of Cal Thomas," from Promise Press, is due in bookstores this month.]

Advocates for embryonic stem cell research are pulling out all the stops,
hoping President Bush will approve federal funding.

A really big gun was brought out last week when former first lady Nancy
Reagan joined two Reagan administration aides - Michael Deaver and Ken
Duberstein - in communicating to the president their support for such
research.

Nancy Reagan's voice should be heard, given the grace and strength she has
shown in taking care of her husband in sickness and in health. But there's
one voice that trumps all the rest - that of Ronald Reagan himself. That
voice has been absent from the public square since the former president
developed Alzheimer's disease, yet he has spoken of the value of human
life and the need to protect it at all stages.

President Reagan wrote a compelling and simple defense of human life in a
1983 essay for Human Life Review. That essay was turned into a book with
concurring opinions by then-Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, and the late
British writer Malcolm Muggeridge.

In his essay, "Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation," Reagan
succinctly and powerfully made his case for the defense of human life,
regardless of status or condition. In his skillful and simple way that
once resonated with so many people, Reagan wrote: "... anyone who doesn't
feel sure whether we are talking about a second human life should clearly
give life the benefit of the doubt. If you don't know whether a body is
alive or dead, you would never bury it. I think this consideration itself
should be enough for all of us to insist on protecting the unborn."

Then Reagan cut to the heart of this continuing and wrenching debate: "The
real question today is not when human life begins, but, What is the value
of human life_... The real question for (the baby) and for all of us is
whether that tiny human life has a God-given right to be protected by the
law - the same right we have."

The July 23 issue of Time magazine trumpets its belief that "apes became
human" and "made an evolutionary leap." If that's true and we're all the
product of evolutionary accident, why stop with embryonic stem cell
research_ Let's experiment on blacks, the retarded, the handicapped and
homosexuals - all of whom some elites in the past have not judged as fully
human. Let's apologize to the descendants of those Nazi doctors who were
simply ahead of their time.

In a Time essay in the same issue, Charles Krauthammer (who was trained as
a medical doctor) says we should proceed with embryonic stem cell
research, but "federal regulation should be strict and unbending." He
wants to ban human cloning and thinks Congress should make it a crime. He
wants to outlaw the creation of embryos solely for the purpose of
harvesting. He would allow stem cell research "only" on discarded
fertility clinic embryos or those from "fetal cadavers" (translation:
aborted babies who can be killed up to the moment of birth).

What moral, ethical or philosophical reason is there for such an approach_
Krauthammer gives none. The next step on this slippery slope will not be
governed by an immutable moral code but by opinion polls, shaped by
scientists who will want to do more simply because they've discovered they
can.

Krauthammer tries to redeem the point he has ceded by claiming that we
"owe posterity a moral universe not trampled and corrupted by arrogant,
brilliant science." We long ago gave up that universe and have settled in
a foreign land. The protective fence that surrounded even agnostics in
past centuries was rooted in the principles of the Ten Commandments and
the philosophy and instructions of the Beatitudes. But we aborted those
principles and now we abort ourselves.

Soon, with no controlling moral authority, we will euthanize the elderly
and the handicapped. At each stage, we will be consoled that we are doing
good. We will have long forgotten the words of Ronald Reagan, as we have
forgotten the words of the prophet Isaiah: "Woe to them who call evil
good."