This image of President Bush and a large group of parents holding their cute children caught my eye this week. If you aren't aware of the context, click here to learn more. Briefly, this is a shot of the President explaining the first veto of his presidency, which shot down expanded stem-cell research. The parents are folks who have used in vitro fertilization (IVF) successfully. They are holding their new babies so the White House staff can make the point that all of the embryos used in stem-cell research could someday be cute children who listen to the President give a speech.

I am not sure what I think of stem-cell research. It seems to bring big advantages to the research community, and has the potential to speed the cures to all sort of diseases, like Parkinson's or Alzheimers. On the other hand, there is something very weird about using a fertilized egg for research. It is creepy.

Now the hypocrisy of the Bush Administration is well documented. There is little need for me to point out the obvious parallels with the War in Iraq when Mr. Bush declares his love of "life" and his distaste for "murder". One need only look at Israel's actions in Lebanon over the last week to see how much action the President is willing to take to stop the killing of innocents. But what of these parents? The ones who seem more than willing to use their children as pawns in a political game.

Didn't these parents create the controversial embryos (zygotes) in the first place? The embryos that Mr. Bush is seeking to protect are created during the process of IVF. Typically, to increase the chance of a successful pregnancy, IVF clinics will place multiple zygotes in a mother's uterus. The average success rate for each IVF placement is approximately 20-30%, which means many women have five embryos placed at a time. As a result of this low success rate, it is estimated that 6 million zygotes (potential babies) have already been killed during the attempts to fertilize these women.

That's six million embryos already killed so these nice people can stand behind Mr. Bush with their new babies. Where's the outrage about that?

Is IVF wrong? I don't know. I am not sure how I would feel about this issue if we were not able to conceive naturally. I'd like to think that I would hesitate before allowing a tech in a lab to make little 20 little Pinkys, and place them in a freezer. I know I would hesitate to discard the 19 little Pinkys that didn't "make it" in our attempts to become pregnant.

But that's not the point. The point here is that these folks who are proudly standing behind the man who is standing in the way of using these unused and unwanted embryos for research are the folks who started this process in the first place. If they are so concerned about the fate of the little babies they made in a jar, who are frozen solid in some lab somewhere, perhaps they should hurry up and start some more IVF cycles? Perhaps they should have six, nine, ten children this way. After all, that is the only way the babies in the freezer are going to see the light of day.

They are either going to bring these embryos to term in their bodies, or they are going to discard them. To even pretend that they are on some sort of moral high ground here is preposterous and, frankly, repulsive.

But that's the world we live in.