Senate Stem Cell Bill Part of Empty Charade

The Senate yesterday passed legislation liberalizing Embryonic Stem Cell (ESC) research. The House has already passed an identical bill, so it will go straight to the White House. The administration has said that, sometime today, the president will issue the first veto of his 6-year long presidency. Two other bills on the same subject, frivolous to the point of irrelevance, will get his signature. All of this is a tightly choreographed charade designed to let Senators and Congressman say they are working on ESC research while talking out of both sides of their mouths.

Thanks to Mr. Bush’s Counter-Enlightenment attitudes about science, he decided in 2001 to prevent any future spending of federal dollars on ESC except for 21 stem cell lines already in use. Since the National Institutes of Health fund most of the ESC research around the world, and not just in the US, this affects all scientific research in the field. Because ESC lines require the destruction of the embryo, the religious fundamentalists believe it is destroying a human life. That is a highly debatable point of ethics, but if Mr. Bush had the courage of his convictions (if they are really his), cutting off future funding is a weak measure at best – criminal penalties are more consistent.

The new bill would lift most of these restrictions, except federal funding couldn’t be used to actually destroy the embryo – private funds would do that. Mr. Bush intends to issue his veto because it doesn’t matter how the destruction is funded. To him, it remains the destruction of a human life. Many red state legislators will be helped if they vote to uphold his veto, and if they happened to vote for the bill in the first place, they can tell those suffering from Parkinson’s, paralysis and other conditions, that they voted to liberalize things as well.

The other two bills that the Senate passed are nonsense. Senators Rick Santorum and Arlen Specter (both Pennsylvania Republicans) wrote a bill instructing the NIH to look for other sources of stem cells other than human embryos. Of course, the NIH already does that, and the bill doesn’t offer any new money to pursue that course.

Then, there is the “Fetus Farming Prohibition Act” (really, that’s what it’s called – one can’t make it up) from Mr. Santorum and Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS). This bill prohibits people from making embryos solely to harvest the stem cells, and it makes it illegal to grow human embryos in animals and use the resulting tissue. No credible scientist has ever suggested either action. Indeed, with 400,000 frozen embryos in lab freezers, there isn’t any reason to go to the added expense.

A war in Afghanistan, one in Iraq, another in Lebanon, nuclear and ballistic missile troubles on the Korean Peninsula, non-existent port security in the US, a trade deficit at record levels, another $250 billion tacked onto the national debt, 44 million without health insurance, and the government of the USA is worried about the threat of fetus farming. No wonder Usama bin Laden is still at large.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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