January 18, 2007

The Washington Post carried a story about a newborn baby named Noah Benton Markham. Noah started life as an embryo, as we all do, but Noah was a frozen embryo, rescued from the great flood that was Katrina.

Noah was one of 1400 embryos stored at New Orleans’ Lakeland hospital. The hurricane swamped the hospital with eight feet of water and knocked out power. The Markham had stored embryos after nearly a decade of infertility.  The picture in the paper show family members around Rebekah Markham’s bed before delivery. They are praying.

The left wants to destroy embryos in their pursuit of supposed cures for serious diseases. The left should complain that Noah’s birth robs them of cells that could have been used to possibly cure the already born of things like Alzheimer’s disease. But of course the Post doesn’t make that point. So I will.

All 1400 of those embryos are human beings. Allowed to grow to maturity they would be fully formed members of the human family. And there is no scientific evidence that killing embryos will cure people with critical diseases even if there was, killing one person to cure another would still be immoral.

Cal Thomas is a nationally syndicated columnist based in Washington, D.C.