North Dakota, Stem Cells, and the Great "Personhood" Lie
April 13, 2009 by diverdonreed
NORTH DAKOTA, STEM CELLS, AND THE GREAT "PERSONHOOD" LIE

Filling sandbags against a raging river, North Dakota citizens inspired the 
world not long ago. Shoulder to shoulder the residents of Fargo, North 
Dakota worked, long nights in the pouring rain- and they built that sandbag 
dam, protecting the lives and homes of their neighbors.

But now imagine a piece of foolishness: suppose a new law has been enacted, 
criminalizing the making of sandbags. The legislation says each grain of 
sand has an existence of its own, and must be allowed freedom, independence, 
and a lawyer: full standing in a court of law.
The new legislation permits-no, requires!-that every sandbag be set free, 
yanked out of those North Dakota dams. And so the floods come roaring down, 
on the undefended homes.

Ridiculous? Don't laugh too soon.
On February 17th, 2009, North Dakota's House of Representatives passed an 
equally short-sighted bill with potentially devastating real-life 
consequences. That bill goes now to the state's Senate.

House Bill 1572 is a "personhood" law. establishing microscopic human cells 
as a person, a full-fledged human being.
It sounds harmless enough, at first.

But this new definition of personhood-giving legal status to tissue samples 
smaller than a grain of sand- could blast the entire field of embryonic stem 
cell research.

Let's take a quick run through this bill, which would so casually 
criminalize one of humanity's best hopes.
Here are a few brief highlights; complete text follows at the end.

98312.0200 Sixty-first Legislative Assembly HOUSE BILL NO. 1572 of North 
Dakota, Introduced by Representative Ruby.
"Section 1. Equality and rights guaranteed to all human beings..
a. "Human being" means any organism, (emphasis added) including the 
single-cell human embryo. (which) possesses a genome (for). the human 
species."
Comment: According to the Human Genome Project, the genome is "found in 
every nucleus of a person's many trillions of cells."
(http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/publicat/primer/prim1.html)
There are approximately 100 trillion human cells in every human 
body-according to the new definition, how many are human beings?

"2. The state shall naturalize all preborn persons and shall afford to them 
all the privileges and immunities of state citizenship, except that the 
state is not required to include preborn children in state and local 
censuses."
Comment: The great commentator and comedian Will Rogers once said, "When 
Congress makes a joke, it's a law." HB 1572 does contain some unintended 
humor, like the above-named census exemption.
With trillions of newly-defined "preborn persons", a census would indeed be 
difficult- not to mention the income tax complications - could we claim our 
own cells as dependents?

But the proponents of this bill are deadly serious.
In a clear attempt to tar stem cells by association (like repeatedly naming 
a Congressman in an article on horsetheft) HB 1572 contains numerous 
references to: incest, abortion, dismemberment, torture- and the killing of 
children.

"Section 3, part d:
"Because scientists have discovered a way of creating pluripotent cells 
using umbilical stem cells, there is no need to kill children to obtain 
their embryonic stem cells."
There it is: the great personhood lie- the pretense that there are children 
involved in embryonic stem cell research.
And what a shameful deception it is.

A blastocyst in a Petri dish is living tissue, not a life.
To prove this, we need only ask ourselves one question:
Can a sperm and egg become a child-outside the womb?
Common sense provides the answer. Without the nurturing shelter of a mother's 
womb, it is biologically impossible to make a child.
No mother, no child: this is not rocket science.
Stem cell research, as the name implies, is cells, cells, nothing but 
cells-and the possibility of cure.

Why would such a ludicrous bill even be considered?
First, the opposition is running scared. They are losing, and they know it. 
When President Obama overturned the Bush restrictions on embryonic stem cell 
research, that put the Federal government officially on our side. The game 
is almost up.

However: if personhood laws can re-define life as having citizenship at the 
single-cell level, the U.S. Supreme Court (remember, the Roberts Court is 
very conservative) might actually find grounds to criminalize the entire 
field of embryonic stem cell research.
Impossible?

The Dickey-Wicker Amendment already blocks federal funding for any new 
embryonic stem cell lines-and it does so with personhood language and 
concepts.
To be continued.

Rayilyn Brown
Director AZNPF
Arizona Chapter National Parkinson Foundation
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