I am pro-life, and I love science

Let's get this straight: I'm in favor of stem cell research. What I'm against is turning human beings into research objects that are "harvested" without their consent in the name of scientific progress. I'm greatly in favor of stem cells. I'm against cloning and killing in order to get them. I'm pro-scientific progress. I'm against creating an industry based on the destruction of human life. I don't want to eat my own offspring to find the fountain of youth -- or anyone else's children either.

Nor do I believe it is necessary. I believe that if you cut off immoral and destructive paths, new scientific vistas will open up, and more quickly than skeptics can imagine.

Indeed, it's already here. Professor Markus Grompe, a geneticist, and Professor Robert George, a Princeton political scientist who is on President Bush's council on bioethics, announced in this week's Wall Street Journal that scientists have discovered several new ways to get embryonic stem cells that do not require the creation or destruction of human life. For example, Oocyte Assisted Reprogramming (OAR) can take the nucleus from your skin cell, insert it into an egg cell, and with a flick of a genetic switch, make a factory for producing embryonic stem cells. Not only would this protect us from becoming consumers of unborn children, but "their genetic constitution would be virtually identical to that of the donor, thus helping to overcome the problem of immune rejection."

Scientists didn't stumble upon this method by accident, but by conscientiously seeking a method of obtaining needed stem cells that would not require the killing of any human life.

Some people want a new political wedge issue. They want to convince you that endorsing cloning and killing of innocent human life is the gateway to paradise, to most likely a cure for Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, diabetes and a host of other cruel diseases.

Ah, but the devil is a liar and the father of all lies. I believe that truth, goodness and scientific progress all lie in the same direction. I believe that human beings, made in the image of God, have the creativity to find better solutions to human problems than those that require killing human life. I believe that, if we seek it, science can unlock human wonders that draw us together rather than divide and conquer our humanity.

What a miracle to find its already happening.