I assisted with an abortion one time in medical school, on my OB-Gyn rotation. I went to the bathroom afterwards, shook and sweated, and then puked my brains out. I refused to help with another abortion. Nobody minded. I delivered about 30 babies during that rotation. Scary if you get into a jam, but otherwise good fun.
Knippenberg considers the embryonic stem cell issue (an issue about which I have no particularly strong opinion), and notes the contradiction between the amoral notion of "let science do science" and the political notion of "most people want this."
I guess pols are experts at insulating their decision-making from morality and ethics. In my view, Utilitarianism, like "efficacy," is neither a moral nor an ethical posture. It's a cop-out. It's the easy way.
From Yuval Levin's Obama's False Choice:
Obama (also) chose to repeat the familiar cliché that the Bush policy was a betrayal of science. In his administration, he argued, “we make scientific decisions based on facts and not ideology.” The facts of the Bush administration’s funding of the research, its support for science funding more generally, and the emergence of alternatives to embryo destruction seem not to count. And the fact that every human embryo is a living human being seemed unworthy of mention.
Science policy is not a science: It must seek to use science to the benefit of the larger society, and also to restrain science in those rare instances when it threatens that society’s ideals. In hindsight, it seems increasingly clear that President Bush’s stem-cell-funding policy will stand as a model of how to strike a balance between these concerns. President Obama’s overturning of the Bush approach offers an unfortunate example of how fragile that balance often is.
Ed. note: Krauthammer today: Morally unserious in the extreme
