A stream of conscious.  What does that mean?  Free flowing thoughts pour forth.  Unknown ideas and related concepts become strung together in some fomat.  If one has a train of thought, a stream of conscious must fire through the neurological pathways in the brain like a speeding, twisting and turning roller coaster ride.  When the mind pouring forth these ideas is as large as every thought expressed on every web page on the planet, just casually browsing the web can turn into a flash flood of the digital planet.

Should a comatose and pregnant mother be kept alive artificially long enough in order to deliver the baby?  I say, yes.  And, it is being done in the case of Susan Torres.  Although this seems to be a highly unusual circumstance, I don't see any moral or ethical problems with it.  As a society, we commonly prolong the life of completely brain dead patients in the hospital in order to harvest organs for transplantation.  While that is more of a scheduling issue and usually doesn't prolong death by more than a day, other suffering and terminal patients wait on long lists for donor organs that save their pathetic and ailing lives.

Practically no one from any spectrum of political or religious thinking believes organ transplantation is unethical or immoral.  Even the typically unmovable and conservative Catholic Church has weighed in on the organ transplantion issue.  Decades ago, the Vatican deemed it a blessing of modern man's technology, and hence, ethical and moral to artificially prolong life because it subsequently preserves the life of another person who is surely condemned to die without the organ transplantation.

On the face of it though, it could seem a bit creepy, especially when viewed in a vaccuum of theoretical morality or ethics.  Stories and modern mythology of third world organ harvesting for transplantion is troublesome -- even if this urban legend about harvesting internal organs actually only happened once with one person in Beijing, China.

But, despite the fact that we are a planet of six billion souls, each person is indeed a new story of tragedy and joy.  Like the Terri Shiavo case, one can't easily make law covering any given personal situation, and politics is certainly not the best boxing ring in which to fight for one side of the argument or another.  When emotions or religious zealotry weigh in on the arguments, logic and scientific facts are usually tossed out with the bath water.

For the most part, science, medicine, law and theology have agreed to pin the question of life and death upon the presence (or lack thereof) of brain activity.  Brain dead is dead.  I think most of the GOP and Evangelical activism concerning Terri Shiavo did not argue this point.  Most of the argument was specifically whether or not Schiavo, herself, was actually in a persistent vegetative state.  The general argument of the vocal Evangelical activism surrounding Shiavo had more to do with their general disdain for the judicial branch of government and its rulings in the Shiavo case, and their fixaton on other pro-life/no-choice social engineering issues. 

While this may seem like an argument that splits hairs -- or actually splits cells -- it is fairly important, when religious beliefs bleed into the arenas of law and government.  The status of the soul is as old as Plato.  The almost romantic notion that life begins at conception is the root of the argument against harvesting stem cells for medical research.  Despite the cuddly grandstanding of the so-called Snowflake Children at the White House, an embryo doesn't have even a hint of a brain until it has developed for about two weeks.

Prior to two weeks maturation, the blissful clump of cells have no brain.  If a person is dead when their previously working brain is dead, why then are a clump of cells with no brain considered to be ethically or morally alive?

Some people will twist this debate by using the potentiality argument.  But like the Snowflake Children, it doesn't answer my specific and basic ethical question concerning the granting of the 'being alive' status, when a week-old embryo can't even be properly called brain dead because it does not even have a brain yet.

The potentiality argument is described by some ethicists as the Home Depot argument.  The stuff for sale inside the Home Depot has the potential to build ten houses, but clearly, it requires some additional effort to build just one house from the building materials.  Similarly, a clump of cells dividing in an invitro fertilization clinic could become a child with a woman willing to carry them around in her belly for the next nine months. Without this additional effort, there is absolutely no potential.

Additonally, there is no conflict between the idea of adopting spare fertilized eggs to become Snowflake Children and using some of them for developing a useful population of embryonic stem cell lines.  There are enough spares to go around for everyone.  The current prohibition based upon romantic religous beliefs only does one thing: it only hobbles the biomedical research capabilities in the U.S. as the work will simply proceed on pace in other countries.

In my humble opinion, it seems hypocritical to use a potentiality argument for Snowflake Children and then not use it concerning embryonic stem cell research by ignoring and dismissing the potentiality of that promising research.  What do you think?


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