The Real Pro-Life Decision
This is the decision the Bush administration faces: Is it more ethical to allow excess human embryos created during fertility treatment to be used for medical research or to have them destroyed and discarded? To scientists, to millions of ill and injured people and their families, the answer seems obvious. Research.
In the White House, however, a battle still rages. Within weeks, President Bush is expected to announce plans to regulate research on stem cells, the “master” cells created just after sperm and egg mix and capable of developing into any sort of specialized body part.
Stem cell research is seen as the most promising path to cures for certain intractable maladies including some forms of heart disease, diabetes, spinal cord injuries and cancer.
Opponents of the research, most of them anti-abortion activists, are furiously lobbying Bush to reverse a sensible compromise proposal developed while President Bill Clinton was in office. It would allow public money to go to researchers who use embryos that would otherwise be destroyed. The opponents have an ally in Karl Rove, Bush’s chief political advisor. A staunch opponent of stem cell research, Rove has urged Bush to oppose funding as a way of wooing Roman Catholic Democrats, who could be vital swing voters in 2004.
Bush should reject Rove’s cynical politicking and embrace the medical common sense of stem cell research supporters in his own administration. These include Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson, a former governor who recognized the field’s great potential when University of Wisconsin scientists pioneered it in 1998.
Stem cell research opponents like Douglas Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee say that banning all federal funding is the only way to thwart ethically controversial research--like the Virginia infertility specialists who on Wednesday reported that they had grown and then harvested embryos created in their lab.
Just the opposite is true. By approving the Clinton administration’s guidelines, whose implementation Bush delayed after taking office, Bush can bring most embryo research under federal ethics and public disclosure rules. He can also ensure that government participates in the serious ethical debate that ought to occur concerning any radical new biotechnology.
By reflexively opposing all federal funding of the field, Bush would only drive private researchers like the Virginia infertility specialists into secrecy. Many bioethicists believe that scientists at private biotech firms and clinics already create embryos as part of their research into fertility techniques and contraception but never acknowledge the practice, which is not illegal.
Earlier this week, legislators began drawing bold battle lines. In the House, influential Republicans from Texas, Majority Leader Dick Armey and Majority Whip Tom DeLay, vowed to lead the fight against what they called “an industry of death.” Bush should reject that empty demagoguery and side with the majority in the Senate. As Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) recently put it, funding stem cell research “is the ultimate pro-life decision.”
