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President George W. Bush delivers remarks about stem cell research policy legislation in the East Room Wednesday, July 19, 2006. “Each of these children was adopted while still an embryo, and has been blessed with the chance to grow up in a loving family,” said the President of children sharing the stage with him. “These boys and girls are not spare parts. They remind us of what is lost when embryos are destroyed in the name of research.”

White House photo by Kimberlee Hewitt

If a human life has to be sacrificed in order to accomplish a scientific goal or to find a solution to a problem, then it’s wrong whether it’s stem cell research or (so-called) mercy killing.

There is always a better way to accomplish good. It might require more effort, thought and/or delay but it’s never right to end someone’s life in order to extend another’s. This, however, has nothing to do with a nations’ national security.

The primary cause of World War ll was the massive delusion infecting many people in Europe, (Germany being the chief perpetrator of the crimes and atrocities) that certain races or groups of people had no right to their lives.

In the late 1930’s the Nazis killed thousands of handicapped Germans by lethal injection and poisonous gas. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, mobile killing units following in the wake of the German Army began shooting massive numbers of Jews and Gypsies in open fields and ravines on the outskirts of conquered cities and towns.

Eventually the Nazis created a more secluded and organized method of killing. Six extermination centers were established in occupied Poland - Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka - where large-scale murder by gas and body disposal through cremation were conducted systematically. Victims were deported to these centers from Western Europe and from the ghettos in Eastern Europe which the Nazis had established. In addition, millions died in the ghettos and concentration camps as a result of forced labor, starvation, exposure, brutality, disease, and execution.

There is a connection between a people/government that would seek to exterminate over six million Jews sixty years ago and a legislature/bioethics lobbyists that would pass a law in order to provide federal funding for scientific experiments on embryos today.

One would have thought that a World War valiantly fought and at great sacrifice, won, would have clarified to the rest of the world until the end of time that killing groups of people for convenience, science or whatever invented need is not only wrong but the ultimate of evil but one would be sadly disappointed.

President Bush cast the first veto of his 5-1/2-year presidency Wednesday, rejecting legislation to ease limits on federal funding for research on stem cells obtained from embryos.

“This bill would support the taking of innocent human life of the hope of finding medical benefits for others. It crosses a moral boundary that our society needs to respect, so I vetoed it,” Bush said at a White House event where he was surrounded by 18 families who “adopted” frozen embryos that were not used by other couples, and then used those leftover embryos to have children.

“Each of these children was still adopted while still an embryo and has been blessed with a chance to grow, to grow up in a loving family. These boys and girls are not spare parts,” he said.

The line starts to blur when people play God.

High on the seventh floor of Memorial Medical Center, some of the city’s sickest patients lay in wet, sweaty sheets, drifting in and out of consciousness.

In the hours before the last of the hospital’s patients were evacuated, one of Hurricane Katrina’s most uncomfortable decisions had to be made: What would happen to those too sick to be moved?

According to a monthslong investigation by the state’s attorney general, a doctor and two nurses “pretended that maybe they were God” and put to death four patients using a lethal injection of drugs, after determining that the four were either too ill or too incapacitated to be transported.

The deceased, who ranged in age from 61 to 90 years old, would have survived Katrina had they not been administered the lethal doses, Louisiana Attorney General Charles C. Foti said.

The Anchoress writes…..

And I say that as a woman dealing with a chronic blood illness, and waiting to hear - finally - about a diagnosis that has taken a great deal of time to pinpoint. Both health issues are being looked into with ADULT stem cells, and that’s good news…I wouldn’t want any treatment derived from EMBRYONIC stem cells.

Given the choice, I’ll take the harder road, and keep faith with the Creator. If you think I’m a fool, then so be it, I’ll be a fool. I won’t live my life at the expense of a life not allowed to live. Maybe - as this 16 year old has figured out, the time I get is all the time I’m supposed to have.