I only just read Kevin Drum’s attempt to rehabilitate Morton Kondracke’s nutty argument that religious conservatives oppose embryo-destructive stem-cell research because of their opposition to illicit sexual activity. Drum argues (1) that the fact that religious conservatives have not protested the routine destruction of embryos at fertility clinics suggests that they are not concerned about embryos as such, and (2) that the fact that self-described pro-lifers are split on embryo-destructive research further suggests that they’re more concerned about sex than “life.”
I can’t see how any of this makes sense. If Drum wants to use religious conservatives’ relative lack of opposition to embryo-destructive stem-cell research as proof that they’re obsessed with sex, he can’t then claim that it’s their obsession with sex that explains their opposition to embryo-destructive research.
As for pro-lifers and fertility clinics: leaving aside the minor point that Drum overestimates how often embryos are “discarded,” I think there are other explanations for the relative silence. Speaking for myself: Until the last few years I was not aware of common practices at those clinics. I would not now try to wage a political campaign against those practices because fertility clinics have too much public support. No sensible political movement would endanger its ability to prevent a new evil by trying to uproot an entrenched one. Is the public support for the clinics related to their not having any connection with illicit sexual activity? Perhaps. But surely a bigger factor is the fact that the clinics have given many couples babies, thus detaching certain pro-life sentiments from pro-life convictions.
The pro-life split on stem cells, meanwhile, is to some extent overhyped. The vast majority of pro-lifers in the Congress oppose federal funding for embryo-destructive research and want to prohibit cloning. The few anti-abortionists who have come out for the research–Frist, Hatch, Rohrbacher, Langevin, etc.–are politically important, but we’re not talking about anything like a 50-50 split here. Stem cells have been an issue for only 4 years, and the vast majority of pro-lifers in politics were able to reach a conclusion about where their principles led them on it pretty quickly.
I don’t think those anti-abortion/pro-embryo-destructive research politicians were moved by hostility to illicit sexual activity, or that they are, in the main, responding to such hostility among segments of the public. The support of the biotech industry is present in the research debate but not the abortion debate. The prospect of cures is present in the former but not the latter–and that has been enormously politically potent. There are other differences, too, but you get the point.