The stem cell debate is yet another ethical dilemma resulting from the declassification of unborn babies as human beings. If society still considered babies at any stage of development to be human beings with the same rights, including the right to life, as any other human, we wouldn't have any problem deciding what to do with the pre-implanted embryos now held in cold storage.

These defenseless, innocent human beings ought to be treated with the same respect and care for their lives as those of us who have grown beyond this stage of human life. You cannot deny the right to life to people at any stage of life without ultimately denying the right to life to people at all stages of life.

These tiniest of babies exist because of either fertility procedures to create children for childless couples or because of the fertilization of human eggs by human sperm for medical research. If they had been created naturally by the meeting of sperm and egg within the human reproductive system of the woman, they would have had the chance to implant and grow to birth. Instead, these young humans are kept at the mercy of the doctors who created them and the parents who requested the procedure as to whether they will be allowed this safe haven to continue their lives or not.

It is argued that they could not survive outside of the womb and so should not be considered viable human beings. That argument was successful to permit elective abortions to be legalized, so it is now extended for these pre-abortion stage babies. These advocates won't even give the children the chance of surviving the abortion industry before they are sacrificed for medical research!

If these embryos are not human life, what is the point of implanting some of them into the womb of a childless couple in an attempt to bear a child made from their own genes? One certainly wouldn't implant a cluster of cells from another species or a small human cancerous tumor to attempt to bear a child. There has to be something more to this special little cluster of cells, something that creates a human being unique from both the mother who donated the egg and the father that donated the sperm that created it. That something is the embryo's own unique human life.

If we don't respect and protect that precious life at all stages of human development, we might as well let all the child killers go free, no matter what age the children were at the time of death. Coroners would have to examine the bodies to see if the "person" had reached their full adult growth before it could be decided that this person had completed their physical development and thus had arrived at fully human legal status. Are we to declare a restricted right to life for children until we declare them to be legally adults, just as we restrict other legal rights? Or have we already done that to justify abortion, and now would extend that to stem cell research?

There is no biologically-based legal argument that can precisely determine the point of human development between conception and full physical adult development where one can say that a separate human life does not exist. The arguments advanced by pro-abortion and stem cell research advocates are based on the norms of their preferred cultural ethics, not on biology. They are no more valid than the arguments advanced by the Nazis to justify the murder of millions of the Jews and of others caught up in the Holocaust.

It is astounding how many people mistake cruelty for personal strength and the abuse of others for assertiveness. This society has sunk so low into Darwinian humanist morality, the bloodied fang and claw of success, that far too many people will agree to allow abortion to be legal rather than stand up to its advocates and declare that there is a moral standard of higher precedence that is being violated here.

Now we face the same battle with stem cell research. If these advocates are so callous of heart that they can vigorously promote the murder of older pre-born infants, they surely won't back down on the question of stem cell research. It is going to take tough laws repealing both elective abortion and stem cell research from human embryos to put a stop to these murders.

The obvious solution to this problem is to implant every one of those embryos into a willing human mother and allow them the chance to grow to birth. If the parents cannot care for that many children, then let them be adopted by other couples. There are thousands of empty arms yearning to care for these children. Give them the chance for life, and let stem cell research continue with stem cells from adult volunteers and placentas. There are plenty of stem cell sources where the donor doesn't have to die to extract them. The urgent need to protect the right to life of these unborn children is well worth any additional cost to use these alternate sources.