What Anna Saw
The truth about stem cells — and a lot more.

April 6, 2001 9:05 a.m.

nna Quindlen has an interesting column in the latest Newsweek. No, really.

Most coverage of the debate over research using stem cells or fetal tissue implies that it has gotten tangled up with the politics of abortion because pro-lifers have irrationally connected the two. Pro-lifers say that of course the two are connected, because they both turn on the question of when life begins. They also note that the idea that abortion could indirectly result in fantastic medical advances might move pregnant women, and citizens generally, in a pro-abortion direction. But this latter argument is not their main one, and it is made only occasionally.

But here comes Anna Quindlen, moved by candor or recklessness, to tell us that it is true. Quindlen, who has often written in favor of legal abortion, says that the likelihood that research using embryos might change attitudes toward abortion is a reason (the reason?) to favor the research. Abortion is something, she gracefully concedes, that "many people still see as a negative act." But "thinking — really thinking — about the use of the earliest embryo for life-saving research might bring a certain long-overdue relativism to discussions of abortion across the board."

For Quindlen to own up to "relativism" is also an act of candor, though her terminology is imprecise. The morality of abortion should be considered relative, or in relation, to what? She does not specify. She can't. If she does, there would be implicit criteria by which one could say that some decisions to abort are objectively wrong. What she actually believes, at least in the case of abortion, is "subjectivism": The morality of a decision depends on the view of the person making it. Which removes both decision and decision-maker from the possibility of judgment. It also removes any possibility that she can know whether she has made the "right" decision — whatever that word means in this moral universe — except perhaps based on how she feels about it.

Given this view of morality, it is not surprising that her column is an appeal to sentiment, not logic. We are supposed to have more sympathy for the distressed women we know than for "those unborn unknown to [us] by circumstance or story." Our sympathy for people suffering from ailments that stem-cell research could cure, prevent, or ameliorate — people such as Christopher Reeve, Michael J. Fox, and Ronald Reagan — is supposed to defeat any mere principled objections we have to that research.

She writes: "[S]ome who believe that life begins at conception may look into the vacant eyes of an adored parent with Alzheimer's or picture a paralyzed child walking again, and take a closer look at what an embryo really is…. It may be an oversimplification to say that real live loved ones trump the imagined unborn, that a cluster of undifferentiated cells due to be discarded anyway is a small price to pay for the health and welfare of millions. Or perhaps it is only a simple commonsensical truth." (Doesn't The Brothers Karamazov have something to say about this kind of bargain?)

Look. Picture. These are acts of dumb perception, not intellection. In the abortion wars, pro-lifers are often cast as the party of emotion and pro-choicers as the party of reason. Quindlen follows this convention in her column, depicting pro-lifers as zealots and pro-choicers as "more thoughtful and reasonable." But "thinking, really thinking," is about the last thing she has in mind.