A Moratorium That Could Kill : Lift the inhumane ban on transplant research using fetal tissue
Even conservative Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) may be slightly less doctrinaire on abortion than George Bush. How else to explain Thurmond’s vote this month for legislation that would lift the Administration’s inhumane ban on transplant research using fetal tissue?
Fetal tissue grafts have shown great promise as a treatment for Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, spinal cord injuries, muscular dystrophy, Alzheimer’s disease and a host of other disorders. These grafts grow so fast they can replace dying cells before the body rejects the transplanted material. But because such tissues come from aborted human fetuses, the Bush Administration has denied funds for this research, as did the Reagan Administration.
Language lifting the research moratorium, part of the National Institutes of Health Reauthorization Act, was passed 13 to 4 by the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources. Joining Thurmond in support were his Republican colleagues Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum of Kansas and James M. Jeffords of Vermont.
The full Senate is expected to take up the reauthorization bill in March. The House passed similar legislation last July that would end the research ban.
Since 1988, the Bush Administration has dogmatically opposed lifting the transplant ban because of its unfounded belief that doing so would be “an incentive to abortion.” This despite the fact that the bill contains solid provisions that would prevent any directed donations of fetal tissues as well as any monetary compensation to the physician or woman who provide the fetal tissue.
The President’s continued ban is not only a cruel slap to the millions of Americans with these major diseases, it’s also counterproductive: Some women who have abortions do so because their fetus carries a severe, irreversible and sometimes fatal birth defect. Fetal tissue transplantation holds the promise of curing some birth defects and ultimately preventing some abortions.
In a cynical effort to derail Senate opposition to the ban, the White House indicated it would permit transplants using tissue from ectopic pregnancies. Trouble is, collection of such tissue is often impractical and the tissue itself can contain chromosomal defects, making it unusable.
Bush’s ban is also patently hypocritical: The NIH is already spending $8 million this year to fund non-transplant research using the very same human fetal tissue.
The rationale for permitting lab research but banning transplant research is thin: Transplants supposedly encourage abortions because they require more tissue than do experiments in Petrie-dishes.
The full Senate must reject such dubious logic, and Bush should lift this callous and counterproductive research moratorium.
