California Institute of Regenerative Medicine Awards Prize to Poem Equating Embryonic Stem Cell Research With Words of Jesus at the Last Supper

And

[Indian] Govt proposes womb banks to legalize surrogacy
“Infertile couples don’t have to go hunting for surrogate mothers. The bank will help them get one. As a result, the couple will have all information about her background and medical history before hiring her womb,” said Dr R S Sharma, deputy director general of Indian Council of Medical Research ( ICMR…), who has been involved in the process of drafting the Bill.”

Speechless

Well worth reading.

Although members of the President’s Council on Bioethics have been divided on this question and some of our colleagues disagree with us, we think it may be useful and clarifying to set the president’s action in three ways into the context of work the council has done over the past seven years.

John Kass in the Chicago Tribune, Stem cell policy shift brings a sinking feeling

Christianity Today, In Over His Pay Grade: When science is made ‘apolitical’ and ‘unencumbered by religion,’ it’s usually to hyper-politicize and hyper-sacralize it.

Rep. Mike Pence in Christianity Today, The Empty Promise of Embryonic Stem Cell Research

Ross Douthat, Stem Cells and Moral Seriousness

Was Clinton’s language deliberate or grossly uninformed?

BTW, MercatorNet.com is definetly something you should be reading.  Thoughtful, well-reasoned, winsome — bookmark it and/or subscribe to their updates immediately.

I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred upon conception. But I also do not believe that a human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserves no more respect than an appendix. Moreover, given the protean power of embryonic manipulation, the temptation it presents to science, and the well-recorded human propensity for evil even in the pursuit of good, lines must be drawn.

But his overall point is sound

Science has everything to say about what is possible. Science has nothing to say about what is permissible. Obama’s pretense that he will “restore science to its rightful place” and make science, not ideology, dispositive in moral debates is yet more rhetorical sleight of hand—this time to abdicate decision-making and color his own ideological preferences as authentically “scientific.”