Just the facts, Mr. President
It shouldn’t take the death of a popular “pro-life” president to put the issue of stem cell research back on the current president’s agenda. Facts and logic should compel a new policy that would allow for more publicly funded research using embryonic stem cells.
President Bush is being lobbied to reconsider his 2001 decision to limit public research on embryonic stem cells. This time, some anti-abortion opponents are joining the call for reconsideration.
More than 200 members of the U.S. House of Representatives recently signed a letter asking the president to lift the ban, including Washington state Reps. George Nethercutt and Jennifer Dunn. Fifty-eight members of the Senate have signed a similar plea, including such anti-abortion stalwarts as Sens. Orrin Hatch, Trent Lott and Kay Bailey Hutchison. But the most dramatic request has come from former first lady Nancy Reagan, who watched her husband spend his final decade at the mercy of Alzheimer’s disease.
What they all note is the promising results from research in other countries and private laboratories in the United States. But that exciting news is tempered by the ban on new stem cell lines, which is slowing progress on possible cures or treatments from Alzheimer’s, juvenile diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease, many cancers and other ailments. They also acknowledge what researchers have been saying all along: There never were 60 stem cell lines to work with. The true number was closer to 15 and some of those were tainted because they included mouse cells, which could introduce unintended diseases.
Objections to embryonic stem cell research come from those who believe that every life – even a pinpoint-sized embryo that has no brain cells, organs, limbs, etc. – is sacred and worthy of protection. The process of extracting stem cells kills an embryo.
Researchers have found that embryonic stem cells (as opposed to adult stem cells) are more versatile and more likely to adapt to whatever use is desired, such as regenerating the dopamine-producing brain cells that could cure Parkinson’s disease. They would like to have access to embryos that are leftover from fertility clinics and are destined to be discarded anyway.
Strangely, pro-life groups are not picketing fertility clinics to defend doomed embryos, which number in the hundreds of thousands. Instead, they are focusing on the small percentage that would die from stem cell research. President Bush himself has lauded in vitro fertilization, even though most of the embryos used in that process will perish. Yet, he clings to the ban, even though the foundation it rests on has been swept away.
If the president believes embryonic stem cell research is morally wrong, then he shouldn’t have allowed research on existing lines. And he should’ve shut down fertility clinics. He didn’t. And that fact should inform his next decision. self end