Throwing Life Away

Visual representations open up a whole new dimension to arguments. They allow readers to instantly get an idea of the creator’s point of view and get a first impression of their argument without the time and effort consuming act of reading through an argument. My topic is the funding of stem cell research and the image that I chose to represent it depicts President Bush talking to a scientist about stem cells and how they hold human life and then throwing them away because it would be more ethical to do that in his opinion than to donate them to scientific use. The comic used an evaluation argument to try to argue what was or was not ethical. By showing Bush saying that the “lives” represented by the embryos should be thrown away it calls his ethics into question and makes the argument that maybe allowing these embryos to be used for research would be a more ethical option than just wasting them. I thought that this argument was successful in getting its point across because it was fairly straightforward and though it was comical it showed an accurate representation of what happened when the laws that President Bush implemented about the use of embryos in stem cell research were put into place. They stopped all government funding for any programs using stem cell research and caused many of the embryos that could have been used in stem cell research to be disposed of.



The video argument that I found was actually very similar to the visual argument that I found in that they both featured President Bush and discussed the idea that throwing embryos away was, in the opinion of the government, a more ethical choice than allowing them to be used for research. The video took it a step further by detailing the ways in which stem cell research could benefit the people of the United States and how we were falling behind in innovations by not taking part in stem cell research. This was a more comical representation of the argument than the comic before was and had more moments where it poked fun at Bush such as when the scientists tried to explain all of the ways in which stem cells could be used and the different uses that the embryos were going to before they were going to research and Bush still thought that throwing the embryos away would be the better choice. The government’s choice to stop funding for embryonic stem cell research is not only putting America behind other world leaders scientifically, but is also making life very difficult for those in the country who suffer from chronic diseases that stem cell research could help cure and who must look outside of the US for some of the treatments that stem cell research has made available.



In response to these two arguments I created a visual argument showing a stem cell thinking about some of the things that it has the potential to be, and then going into a bio hazard container because the government wants it to. I am agreeing with these arguments in showing how throwing away embryos that could be used for stem cell research is unethical. There is so much untapped potential in stem cell research, illustrated by the things that the stem cell in my argument is thinking about, however as long as the moral dilemma over the subject continues it will be impossible for the United States to catch up to other countries in the world who have already been successful in research.

Elise Bautista