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3 Abortion and the Embryo Right-to-Life Arguments as a Source for Rhetorical Invention opponents of ES cell research have a difficult time challenging the language of future medical applications and its innate appeal to hope.Attacking the hope of curingAlzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease is quixotic at best.Instead,opponents deploy other lines of argument to dissuade people from supporting ES cell research. Because ES cell research deals with the beginnings of human life, one readily available resource for opponents as well as journalists covering this debate is the cultural history of abortion in the United States.Journalists define the abortion debate as the Burkean scene wherein the action of the ES cell debate takes place (Burke, 1969b). opponents use the resources of the abortion debate to define ES cells so that they appear in a negative light. These uses of right-to-life arguments can shift public argument from a scientistic to a Manichean idiom. A Manichean idiom creates dichotomous categories and allows for no middle ground.This complicates the use of right-tolife arguments for both journalists and opponents of the research in several ways. first, prominent pro-life politicians, like orrin Hatch and Bill frist, support ES cell research,thus muddying the division between“good”objections (and those voicing them) and “evil” research (and those who practice it). Journalists must account for this division within the movement even as they frame the ES cell debate as an extension of debates over abortion.Pro-life opponents must address the division within their movement in order to maintain the integrity of the inventional resources they use to tackle ES cell research. Second, this move toward a Manichean idiom can be problematic for opponents since the creation of real definitions resides in a scientistic idiom. Science and the scientistic idiom establish what counts as real for many public debates, but the pro-life movement is perceived as religiously motivated.This makes it challenging to translate pro-life objections to ES cell research into an idiom open to anyone, regardless of religious affiliation. framing an issue as science versus religion can be very effective,as can be seen in the opposition to teaching evolution,but evolution is divorced from practical outcomes,like curing disease, Right-to-Life Arguments / 45 in ways that ES cell research is not.1 Insofar as medical applications are treated as a fact, pro-life objections,especially their association with religion,will appear as opinion or value statements that do not comport with the “reality” of stem cell research and its promise. furthermore, even if a Manichean idiom were effective in generally framing ES cell research,the prominent defectors from the prolife camp on this issue create the impression that ES cell research can be moral within a pro-life framework. finally, arguments by opponents are complicated by developments in some scientific and cultural practices. Practices involving in vitro fertilization (Ivf) and determining fetal death for epidemiological studies have troubled the use of the “public fetus,” which is the central rhetorical figure of right-to-life arguments . The arguments used in the abortion debate do not easily transfer from discussions of late-term fetuses with their obvious visual similarity to actual people to the earliest stages of human life, which do not appear obviously human. opponents must explicitly extend the rights of actual humans to the 14-day-old blastocyst from which ES cells are derived. In describing debates about this research,journalists must either deflect attention away from prominent defectors in the pro-life camp or deploy rhetorical figures that can account for them while maintaining the integrity of abortion as the scene that renders the debate intelligible. opponents must reinvent their arguments. Specifically, they must extend the public fetus to earlier, embryonic forms of human life, while also trying to recast their objections in a scientistic idiom to define ES cells as a direct harm to developing human life. Setting the Scene: Using Abortion to Make Sense of the Stem Cell Controversy Journalistic coverage of the ES cell debate aims to explain what is happening in a technologically and scientifically complex area. Among the issues they seek to explain are the objections to the research.To do that, journalists emphasize the scene:They explain the action and agents in the ES cell debate against the backdrop of the abortion issue.This does not mean that journalists have chosen abortion from a set of equally likely options for explaining this issue without...

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