Thank you for clearing up that blastocyst stuff. Governor Romney (R-Mass) made me dizzy with this info last year while attempting to explain his flip-flop on this subject. He was for it before it he was against it, ie. for it pre-election and against it post-election. ***Also people, take heed, this guy is running for president in ‘08 and not only is he one of the biggest flip-floppers on stem-cell research, he also changed his mind on emergency contraception. He’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing and shame on us because we fell for it - but that’s a story for another day.

Speaking of flip-floppers, it would be interesting to know how many would save their loved ones if they knew that the ‘cure’ was a result of this research. Probably the same percentage of anti-choice people who rationalize that it’s OK for them to get an abortion when they find themselves in the unfortunate position of an unwanted/dangerous/result-of-rape or incest pregnancy.

The only thing I can come up with (imagining a blastocyst to be equivalent to a human life in any meaningful way): the fear that benefiting from blastocyst destruction by getting to carry out - and eventually use - potentially life-saving research just trips over a ethical line re: the value and sanctity of human life, and starts sliding down that infamous slippery slope to death camps and who knows what, in a way that simply trashing them without benefit doesn’t. Or even without considering such consequences, that simply benefiting from a wrong is wrong. In this view, such waste is morally superior for being a waste, a refusal to benefit. The closest analogy I can imagine is with the idea that killing soldiers or perhaps death row inmates is (generally) acceptable, but using them for scientific experimentation and organ harvesting isn’t, even if it would save lives. Or perhaps the controversy over using medical research or (iirc) medical illustrations deriving from Nazi concentration camps. (But temperance sounds sorta on the right track too, in that I don’t think most folks woulda had this frame if they hadn’t been producing and consuming all this culture of death stuff for some time as part of the anti-abortion mindset.)

But of course, this is ridiculously incoherent, unless one starts to view ivf as some sort of vast and vital War on Blastocysts (we’re freezing them over there so we don’t have to freeze them over here?). The logical thing for them to do (given that initial conviction), as endlessly pointed out and as you show, is to oppose ivf as equally benefitting from the destruction of invisible babies. But mostly they can’t seem to do this, presumably because they feel ivf to be a good thing (or understand that the public does). And I’m sure they’re not comfortable with the idea of people suffering, even as a result of what they see as a moral good (or realize the public isn’t).

Hence the myths (in the technical sense of resolving contradictions) of snowflake babies as a viable solution, of embryonic stem cells not really being all that useful, of adult stem cells being just as good. Or, to use your much clearer and more focused phrase, elective ignorance.

Or, to use a much vaguer and less useful term, people are really frickin’ stupid.