California had a proposal to borrow money to fund a stem cell research institute, which narrowly passed in 2020. This topic doesn’t come up often in elections. However, since some of the the Covid-19 vaccines have used fetal cell lines, and others don’t have the cells in the vaccines but used them in testing, the topic could come up in a referendum. The principles below apply to any form of killing young human beings for otherwise admirable medical purposes.
The Creativity of the Foreclosed Option
It’s a common idea that if you forbid something – in our case, any form of killing human beings – you then have fewer options, because after all you just foreclosed one. Yet what we find is that when violence isn’t on the table, creative solutions become available that weren’t thought of before.
Pacifists come up with conflict resolution techniques and nonviolent revolutions. Pro-lifers come up with crisis pregnancy centers and public policy options that help new mothers. Euthanasia opponents deal with hospice care and better avenues for medical advancements.
Here’s a 2010 article from the Washington Post with the same principle: scientists who were under pressure not to use stem cells in a way that kills embryos quickly became quite adept at alternatives. This was a foreseeable consequence, because the quick-fix of violence is an illusion that can’t compete with nonviolent creativity when such creativity is allowed the upper hand.
A great advance was made by someone explicitly wanting to find an alternative: Shinya Yamanaka won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2012 for his research in induced pluripotent stem cells.
The New York Times reports the story of when Yamanaka looked at a human embryo in a microscope, “The glimpse changed his scientific career. ‘When I saw the embryo, I suddenly realized there was such a small difference between it and my daughters . . . I thought, we can’t keep destroying embryos for our research. There must be another way.’”
He found that other way, programing adult cells to act as stem cells. William Saletan reports this as a win-win conflict resolution for both sides of the embryonic stem-cell debate.
Finding nonviolent ways to reach worthwhile goals is of course the most effective way of preventing acts of violence of all kinds. His prize was in medicine, but by establishing a nonviolent technique, Yamanaka also promoted peace.
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