Stem Cell Research

Yesterday on the news a fundamentalist told a reporter that church law states that life is to be considered sacred from conception to natural death, and that stem cell research is therefore immoral and ought not be allowed. Given that each of us is required to choose our own moral standard (whether we subscribe to the laws of a particular church organization, create a set of morals ourselves by which we choose to live, or disregard questions of morality altogether in our decision-making) and given that our nation subscribes to a principle of separation of church and state, church law, even if it's the law of the majority of churches in our nation, ought to have no bearing on the formation of secular law. Secular law in our land is rightfully formed based upon the majority of individual opinions, and individual opinion often takes into account the human factor, allowing space between church law and civil law in which the individual may make his or her choices according to his or her own moral feelings in a given moment and circumstance, which is likely to bring the majority in this and any moral question to a place in which civil law either does not deal with the issue or deals with it only in the sense of setting appropriate and commonly-accepted boundaries and guidelines around them (saying nothing about the legality or illegality of stem cell research, for instance, but seeing to it that appropriate sources are used, facilities are maintained properly, research is conducted ethically, etc.).

My question would be, if life is sacred from conception to natural death, is it morally appropriate to take any measure to avoid death when it arrives by nature? In other words, is it appropriate under that church law to, for instance, have a surgery or take a medication that mitigates symptoms that would otherwise eventually result in death? Would one not eventually pass the point at which natural death would otherwise have occurred, and does the life then become profane, or simply worthless? Perhaps this explains the reasoning by which babies who are being aborted anyway are to be treated as waste once their unnatural death has occurred rather than utilized to discover and treat illness in those who are still alive.

Curiously and with love
Peace