Bush, Fearless Champion of the Frozen Blastocyst

A fun game to play while we wait for January, 2009, is to read the words and consider the "reasoning" of the Occupant-in-Chief in the White House, and to pretend they make sense while knowing all the time they do not. Thus, along the lines of this game, you can consider the "implications" of his "thinking" in an effort to determine his "meaning" and the "principles" which underlie it. You may also wish to count the holes in the acoustic ceiling of the next elementary school classroom you find yourself in. Your choice. The reward is about the same. I have sometimes mused, in accordance with modern pop-psych theory, that the entire United States of America and all its people currently suffer from reality distortion caused by having an untreated alcoholic as their Father Figure. Bush constantly tells us to deny the authority of our senses and to treat inane utterances as deep, revealed wisdom. We're all going nuts because this state of affairs has gone on much too long. As one example among thousands, Bush tells us we must win in Iraq (meaning: kill all the Arabs) or they will all "follow us home," even though we know that they "followed us here" on September 11, 2001, even before we "followed" them over there, thus indicating they know where we are already (although the "there" in Iraq's case was not the "there" they were from, but a different there, and the ones we followed were not the "they" we're at war with but a different "they" we picked out of the Yellow Pages, or something).

So Bush is about to veto another stem cell bill, playing the role, as he always does, of the Vatican to the scientific establishment's Galileo. Bush is the ultimate Choke Point for all scientific progress in the U.S.A. But while we twiddle our thumbs, belching out CO2 and falling behind the rest of the world in cutting edge research, we can play the Bush Game just to pass the time. Bush is the fearless champion of all those frozen blastocysts residing in fertility clinic freezers all over this blessed land. While it is not certain how much time he actually spends with them, he clearly feels that he is the only one standing between them and a kind of Frigidaire Genocide lusted after by all the murderous stem cell researchers who want them for spare parts. Indeed, Bush's main objection to stem cell research is that sacrificing a four-day old clump of cells is "murder." So let's consider that claim.

First, homicide as an everyday kind of crime is within state jurisdiction. The Feds can prosecute murder only when federal issues are involved, such as in an armed robbery of a bank (interstate commerce clause) or assassination of a federal official. California, for example, considered the idea of fetal murder and amended the main Penal Code Section, 187, to conform to general dissatisfaction with the outcome of the Keeler case in 1970, where, up in the mountains of Amador County where Gold Rush customs still reside, the husband of a woman 35 weeks pregnant became enraged upon discovering he was not the father and attacked his wife, resulting in still birth. After the amendment, the statute read like this:

187. (a) Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being, or a fetus, with malice aforethought.

Because legislators are not the most diligent and thorough of public servants, they didn't bother to define "fetus," a kind of obvious oversight, when you think about it. What were the odds a clever defense lawyer would not try to avoid a murder charge by arguing that whatever that clump of cells his client knocked off was, it wasn't yet a "fetus?" Sure enough, in 1994 in People vs. Davis the California Supreme Court was forced to read the tea leaves left behind by the legislature a generation earlier to try to figure out what they meant. After going through cases from all over the map, and doing the usual kind of halfbaked analysis of embryonic science that judges usually do, they came up with "7-8 weeks." That's when all the "bodily structures" are present in nascent form, they said. Davis got off, however, because how was he to know the woman he shot in the chest at the convenience store was farther along than that, and that Justice Stanley Mosk of the Supreme Court was going to pencil in a start-date for feticide after he pulled the trigger? Another glorious day in jurisprudence.

Section 187 excepts from its rule any therapeutic abortion or any "feticide" to which the mother consents (subsection c). So, just to use California for the moment, donation of a blastocyst to research could not be "murder" under California Penal Code Section 187. The blastocysts are not 7-8 weeks along in development, and they lack the "bodily structures" in nascent form which Davis requires. And the mother's consent wipes out the "crime" in any event, maybe because she'd like to see an actual human being reconnect the nervous tissue at C-5 and walk again, and values this outcome more than eternal life for her "offspring" in the Jenn-Air down at the lab.

So what do you say, George, while we're playing this silly little game? You know you don't mean it anyway; I've seen few people in public life who demonstrate their contempt for human life more than you do. How about an exception for any blastocyst where Mom says OK? Win-win? Worried the blastocysts might follow you home?


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