"The Illinois Senate voted Friday to spend state tax dollars on embryonic stem cell research, despite objections from those who argue the research destroys human life.

The measure passed 35-23 and now goes to the Illinois House.

Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich has already used his executive powers to fund stem cell research. He created the Illinois Regenerative Medicine Institute, which has awarded $15 million in grants.

The Senate legislation would make the institute and its grants a part of state law.

...[O]pponents condemn the research because it involves the destruction of human embryos.  'Obviously we all want cures to diseases. The question is, what are willing to sacrifice to get them?' said Sen. Chris Lauzen, R-Aurora. 'The unique identity of an individual human being disappears for eternity.'

Some senators also questioned the idea of spending money on the research when the state is already in trouble financially."

"With each new round of argument, the ethical questions at the heart of the embryonic stem cell debate get buried under more layers of hype and confusion.

...All of this leaves us confused over just what the debate is about. It is, to begin with, not about stem cell research, any more than an argument about the lethal extraction of livers from Chinese political prisoners would be a debate about organ transplantation. There are ethical and unethical ways to transplant organs, and there are ethical and unethical ways to conduct stem cell research. The question is to which category a particular technique - the destruction of living embryos for their cells - belongs.

The debate is also not about whether there ought to be ethical limits on science. Everyone agrees there should be strict limits when research involves human subjects. The question is whether embryos destroyed for their cells are such human subjects.

But that does not mean the stem cell debate is about when human life begins. It is a simple and uncontroversial biological fact that a human life begins when an embryo is created. That embryo is human, and it is alive; its human life will last until its death, whether that comes days after conception or many decades later surrounded by children and grandchildren.

...At its heart, then, when the biology and politics have been stipulated away, the stem cell debate is not about when human life begins but about whether every human life is equal. The circumstances of the embryo outside the body of a mother put that question in perhaps the most exaggerated form imaginable, but they do not change the question.

America's birth charter, the Declaration of Independence, asserts a positive answer to the question, and in lieu of an argument offers another assertion: that our equality is self-evident. But it is not. Indeed, the evidence of nature sometimes makes it very hard to believe that all human beings are equal. It takes a profound moral case to defend the proposition that the youngest and the oldest, the weakest and the strongest, all of us, simply by virtue of our common humanity, are in some basic and inalienable way equals.

...If we cannot pass this first and simplest test of our devotion to human equality and dignity in the age of biotechnology, we will have little chance of meeting the far more difficult challenges to come. Biomedical science can offer us tremendous benefits, but only if we make sure they do not come at the cost of our highest ideals."

Twenty-five years ago, economist Gary Becker argued that a division of labor between husband and wife makes marriage an economic bargain. While he documented how the rise of women in the workplace upsets that equilibrium-making marriage less attractive and divorce more attractive-two economists at the University of Toronto now document how another phenomenon of the past generation-the legalization of abortion-also reduces the economic gains to marriage for young adults, depressing marriage rates.

Using U.S. Census data, the researchers construct population vectors showing that the number of marriage-available men increased 46 percent, while the number of available women increased 39 percent, between 1970 and 1980. And using vital statistics, they construct bivariate distributions showing that the number of marriages between the years 1971-72 and 1981-82 increased only marginally, by 6.5 percent. Their bivariate age distributions further show that the average age of men and women who married increased between the two reference points, even as the average age of available men and women actually declined.

Then borrowing Becker's static transferable utility model of the marriage market, they estimate the net gain relative to not marrying for men and women, finding that 20-year-old women receive the largest gains when marrying slightly older men and that 20-year-old men receive the largest gains when marrying slightly younger women. Yet in plotting the changes in marriage gains over the decade, they find "a sharp drop in the estimated total gain to marriage to young adults between the ages of 16 and 30."

To quantify the impact of abortion on this decline, the economists break down their results state by state, finding-in 1970 but not in 1980-lower gains to marriage in 12 "reform" states that had made legal abortion easier to obtain prior to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision relative to the remaining 38 states that had not. And the difference was concentrated among younger men and women: "The drop in the gains to marriage for same-age spouses, between the ages of 19 and 26, living in reform states in 1971-72 relative to those living in nonreform states is substantial."

Had the nonreform states also partially legalized abortion before 1973, the economists claim that fewer U.S. couples would have tied the knot in 1971-72. They estimate that for men, ages 16 to 25, that social change "would have lowered the total number of marriages in this age group by 4.2 percent, where as among 16 to 25-year-old women, the decrease is about 3.6 percent." For men and women older than 26, the respective figures are 3.8 percent and 5.2 percent.

While recognizing that other factors also contribute to changing marriage patterns during the 1970s, these two professors nonetheless show that when judges or legislators claim to be granting new rights to women, they end up taking other things away, in this case the likelihood of living happily ever after.