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Stem cells Picture This, Mr. PresidentBy Rick Horowitz It was touching. But then, it was designed to be touching. You don't surround the president of the United States with gurgling infants in their parents' arms and not expect to pluck some heartstrings. From the photo-op shop that brought you soldiers and cyclists, black folks and banners: babies. Babies in the East Room. And not just any babies. These were the babies the president calls "snowflakes" -- babies who were "adopted" when they were still just frozen embryos, and who were brought to cooing, grinning life through in vitro fertilization.
It's simple. It's straightforward. That's the way this president prefers things, simple and straightforward. Draw a line. Hold the line. So this is where he chooses to exercise his first veto in more than five years in the White House. His choice. And he's willing to live with the consequences, political and otherwise. But as long as we're on the subject... The subject of photo-ops, that is. As long as we're in the market for visuals with verve, I've got a couple of suggestions the White House might consider for the president's next appearance before the cameras. Just call it working with a wider-angle lens. My first suggestion: Keep everything exactly the same as it was on Wednesday -- the glamour of the East Room, the president on the podium, the chairs filled with invited guests. Except that instead of happy, healthy babies, the president would be surrounded by the halt and the lame. Babies included -- but not just babies. Toddlers and tweens and teens, young adults and not-so-young adults, the middle-aged and the elderly. And all of them with this in common: They have conditions -- diabetes, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, spinal-cord injury -- that might be eased, or even cured, with future advances in embryonic-stem-cell research. Advances that could be delayed, or even denied, because of the president's veto. If there's still room on the podium, and I realize there might not be -- after all, there are a lot of people with one or another of these conditions -- then you could also surround the president with those people's loved ones, the parents and children, friends and relatives who most care about them, and who often care for them. Of course, there are also plenty of other people who are perfectly healthy, whose families and friends are perfectly healthy, too -- for the moment. They can only imagine (if they even allow themselves to imagine) what it would be like to be stricken with some serious, but potentially fixable, ailment. We'll just have to leave them off the podium for now; we wouldn't want to violate the fire code. "That's manipulative!" you're thinking. "Much too manipulative!" You're right. Putting a human face -- millions of human faces, in fact -- on such an emotional debate is almost like cheating. It would force people to confront the human costs of insisting that a microscopic clump of cells sitting in a freezer drawer has a stronger claim on our compassion than a suffering parent, child, spouse. You're right -- much too manipulative. So let's clear all those people off the podium. (But be patient with them -- some of them don't move so well.) Instead of human beings up there to symbolize pain and promise and possibilities denied, let's go for something a little less emotional. A little more inanimate. Trash cans. Trash cans, to symbolize where the vast, vast majority of those frozen embryos will end up, and where they'll continue to end up under the president's plan, doing absolutely no good for anyone. Surround the president with trash cans, and we'll finally have a photo-op that means something. Posted 7/20/06. Get
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Rick Horowitz
