President’s Message: Confronting Human Cloning, Killing Research Reality

Over my years as President of Right to Life of Michigan, I have found that each new year brings new challenges and opportunities. The challenge of defending the right to life continues as those who have a romance with death find new ways to attack the principle that each and every life has immeasurable value.

In his book “The Case for Democracy,” Natan Sharansky describes the difference between the world of fear and the world of freedom:

“In the former, the primary challenge is finding the inner strength to confront evil. In the latter, the primary challenge is finding the moral clarity to see evil.”

Sharansky’s observations about the differences in human behavior in reacting to evil in a tyrannical government versus a democratic government can be applied to what is now happening in our society’s reactions to human embryonic stem cell research. In our world of freedom, the challenge appears to be finding moral clarity in the debate over whether it is ever good to use and kill a human being, albeit a very tiny human being, for research.

Part of this debate has long passed us by. Such killing research happens every day in private and university labs. The present debate centers upon expanding the research on existing human embryos, creating human embryos solely for research, cloning human embryos and doing all with federal and/or state tax dollars. Powerful figures such as Michigan’s Governor and U.S. Senator are in favor of overturning Michigan’s present protections for human embryos.

Although Sharansky was not writing about our prolife issues in his book, he defended human rights with these words:

“Protecting the right to life, the most precious human right of all and the right that makes the exercise of all other rights possible, is the highest obligation of any government.”

During this year we will find that some of our elected officials will twist these words of government obligation to try to convince our fellow citizens that it is the duty of government to experiment on some human beings to perhaps find cures for those who are older, bigger and more powerful.

I don’t doubt that the prolife movement will have the “inner strength” to confront the evil of human cloning and killing research. Our primary challenge may well be getting our fellow citizens to accept the need for restraint in the scientific field of human cloning and the “moral clarity” to see the evil that will result without that restraint.

For information to help in this new challenge of human embryo stem cell destruction, see our special web site, www.stemcellresearchcures.com, and order our new booklet “If they say...you say” which is a primer on human embryo stem cells. We all must be prepared to contain this new attack on the sanctity of human life.

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