When President Obama lifted the limit to federal funding of embryonic stem cell research put into place by President Bush, he accused President Bush of politicizing science. That couldn’t be farther from the truth.
This morning Robert George was on Bill Bennett’s radio show and what he had to say was quite disturbing, to put it mildly. Obama will restrict cloned embryos from being implanted into a woman’s womb. However, there won’t be any federal funding limit to the cloning of embryos for the purpose of destroying those embryos.
He also talked about the tendency of embryonic stem cells to grow into tumors. Because the embryonic cells are unstable, Mr. George said that researchers could implant the embryos into a womb to “stabilize” the embryo before it’s aborted. That’s horrific. I’ve never heard of anyone who purposely got pregnant for the sole purpose of having an abortion. What kind of people have we become if we allow this practice?
Mr. George, along with Eric Cohen wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal. George and Cohen argue that President Bush was actually a moderate on the stem cell issue, not some radical right winger as he’s been portrayed.
Yesterday President Barack Obama issued an executive order that authorizes expanded federal funding for research using stem cells produced by destroying human embryos. The announcement was classic Obama: advancing radical policies while seeming calm and moderate, and preaching the gospel of civility while accusing those who disagree with the policies of being “divisive” and even “politicizing science.”
Mr. Obama’s executive order overturned an attempt by President George W. Bush in 2001 to do justice to both the promise of stem-cell science and the demands of ethics. The Bush policy was to allow the government to fund research on existing embryonic stem-cell lines, where the embryos in question had already been destroyed. But it would not fund, or in any way incentivize, the ongoing destruction of human embryos.
For years, this policy was attacked by advocates of embryo-destructive research. Mr. Bush and the “religious right” were depicted as antiscience villains and embryonic stem-cell scientists and their allies were seen as the beleaguered saviors of the sick. In reality, Mr. Bush’s policy was one of moderation. It did not ban new embryo-destructive research (the president had no power to do that), and it did not fund new embryo-destructive research.
Furthermore, Barack Obama is the one “politicizing” this issue, not President Bush.
First, the Obama policy is itself blatantly political. It is red meat to his Bush-hating base, yet pays no more than lip service to recent scientific breakthroughs that make possible the production of cells that are biologically equivalent to embryonic stem cells without the need to create or kill human embryos. Inexplicably — apart from political motivations — Mr. Obama revoked not only the Bush restrictions on embryo destructive research funding, but also the 2007 executive order that encourages the National Institutes of Health to explore non-embryo-destructive sources of stem cells.
Second and more fundamentally, the claim about taking politics out of science is in the deepest sense antidemocratic. The question of whether to destroy human embryos for research purposes is not fundamentally a scientific question; it is a moral and civic question about the proper uses, ambitions and limits of science. It is a question about how we will treat members of the human family at the very dawn of life; about our willingness to seek alternative paths to medical progress that respect human dignity.
For more information on this subject visit Moral Accountability.
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