[JMvS]

Sorry Kaijo, but on a few points you are making gross oversimplifications or just being plainly wrong.

Originally Posted by Kaijo

This is a hot button topic, and a lot of what I was going to say, has already been said. Both Embryo and Adult stem cells have their pros and cons. But as far as life goes, there is something else to consider.

When people turn to invitro fertilization in order to have a child, it takes a lot of eggs and sperm to finally get one that works. A lot of fertilized cells are thus frozen and forgotten about once the couple finally gets a working pregnancy. What happens to them? Generally, they are kept for a long time, and then destroyed. If you really believe that life starts at conception, then you should be championing to have the woman implant all those fertilized eggs and have the babies.

But you won't hear people arguing that, because even the most die-hard fundamentalist wants the benefits of science while side-stepping the moral issues. You'd have to argue against invitro fertilization because by definition of your faith, it results in the death of embryos, ie, babies.

You are seriously underestimating the power of human convictions here. For I have met peoples who mere militating exactly on these issues:
Pushing for allowing surplus IVF embryos to be adopted. Trust me, there are peoples for whom human life is absolute as that, and there are other peoples ready to adopt an embryo (i.e couples unables to procreate, but with the woman with a perfectly functional matrix, she can even carry it past her menopause).

And sometimes more than the whole issue of manipulating human reproduction, the fate of surplus embryos is precisely one of the main concerns of many pro-life or christian activists in IVF related issues. Some simply reconcile it by implanting all the embryos produced for the IVF procedure, thus producing no surplus embryos.

The most die-hard fundamentalist wanting the benefits of science while side-stepping the moral issues? Do you really think human convictions work this way? Have you not heard of peoples refusing blood transfusion because it goes against their beliefs? Why do you think there are ethical commities overseeing ethically sensible fields of research? Or maybe you've not heard of massive protests against GMOs? Or other simply dying for whatever idea?

So the process for gaining embryo stem cells is already happening; instead of studying them, though, we're just leaving them frozen and eventually trashing them. Instead of trashing them, why not use them for research?

That's a nice utilitarian argument, but one peoples will still oppose you on. For those valuing human individuals rights in the broadest possible sense, this is nothing but organ stealing.

Now, assume that embryo stem cells work for a large number of diseases or conditions. We don't need to go creating babies specifically to harvest them. Only one fertilized egg is needed, because they can use just that one to continually create however many stems I might need over the course of my life. The "baby" technically never dies; it's just never born.

You're making two disputable assumptions here, and another simple mistake: curative usefulness of embryonic stem cells is still far from being proven, and the actual range of its application still vague; and you are plainly ignoring immunity issues.
And yes the "baby" dies: for the moment it is dismantled to extract its pluripotent cells, the possibility of it growing into a full human organism is terminated, for those cells have the potential of turning in all kinds of tissue, but not a whole organism.
For example, peoples have been keeping some chicken hearth tissue alive for who knows how long in a vat somewhere, but the chicken is long dead.

The main arguments you will see against this, is people claiming that babies will be grown and farmed. Lives will be killed to save other lives, but this is technically not true, and won't be the end result. Instead, just like invitro fertilization, you'll have one or two cell clumps in reserve from which any number of stem cells can be generated.

As I aforementioned, you simply pass by the issues regarding immunological compatibility.

In short, you're either for both invitro fertilization and embryonic stem cells, or against them both. And so far, there hasn't been much of a fuss about invitro fertilization, and we've already seen incredible benefits in allowing parents to have children, who had problems with the natural method.

So no, it is not that simple.