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American aphorist Mason Cooley is quoted as saying “Human society sustains itself by transforming nature into garbage.”

Perhaps if he was still alive today he would revise his statement to say “Nature is overcome by turning humans into garbage.” And if he wouldn’t say it, I sure will.

The unfortunate and ghastly truth is that today that is exactly how we view our most helpless and dependent humans, the ones not yet born. The medical terms embryo and fetus have replaced baby, infant and child in everyday vernacular. The terms once reserved for medical professionals are now bandied about by school children. The words have changed but more importantly changing the words has numbed the public consciousness. The change in mind set was mandatory if the pro-abortion political action committees were to succeed. It sounds far more acceptable to abort a fetus or an embryo than to abort a baby or a child.

And after they are aborted they are no longer human. They are now trash, disposable, garbage, bio-hazardous waste. The terms being used to justify harvesting these tiny human babies makes them sound much more like a wart or a tumor that was removed than a baby who had his or her future snuffed out in the name of science.

That is exactly what our new president is doing in justifying the new harvesting program of baby stem cells and overturning George W Bush’s ban on creating new lines of stem cells. As has been repeated countless times by those supporting this end of life “these embryos were simply going to be disposed of – trashed – thrown away (you pick the transitive verb) anyway. We might as well use them in the name if science.”

By its very nature science has no morals. It is facts and mechanics, equations and data. Science is not necessarily heartless but it is cold. Experimentation and test results are the goal. Fitting pieces into a puzzle and discovering what the big picture looks like is the game. Morality has no place in science, especially if it stands in the way of that next big discovery.

I am actually grateful to the pioneers of surgery that paid grave robbers to bring them fresh corpses for their scientific exploration of the human body. As repulsive as the idea of robbing a grave was, the unfortunate buried treasure being dug up, having lived all the days of their life, was no longer in need of the human shell from which their soul was released. And the use of those buried bodies hurt no one but has literally saved millions. That was until some more mercenary grave robbers figured out that it was a lot easier on their back and a lot more beneficial to their pocketbook if they just kill someone and sell the body than it was to wait until they were dead and buried and dig them back up. At that point it went from revolting behavior for the sake of science to capital murder for the sake of a few bucks. The mercenaries were caught, tried and hung. It seems that even in those dark ages of scientific discovery they understood the important difference between using that which is already dead and ending a life to make it so. Unfortunately, we in this age of advanced enlightenment have lost the ability to distinguish between the two.

It is not a question if left vs. right, liberal vs. conservative. It is a moral question of that which is right vs. that which is wrong. The business of harvesting human embryos just got a stimulus package from the American taxpayer thanks to this new president and his misguided interpretation of science over morality. And that priority is simply and unequivically wrong.

No one will ever know what these living, growing human babies would have become.

Maybe the answer to all our scientific questions lies in their potential rather than in their stem cells.