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 part
from the most important aspects of the embryonic-stem-cell debate
— i.e., the moral and philosophical arguments best articulated by
Michael
Novak in his compelling NRO piece today — I am left to wonder
how the issue of federally funding embryonic-stem-cell research
made its way to the president's desk in the first place.
The Washington
Times reports that, "Congress in 1995 banned the use of
federal money for research in which embryos are 'destroyed, discarded
or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death.' Encouraged by
the Clinton administration, the National Institutes of Health (NIH)
last August issued guidelines that let federally funded scientists
bypass the law by obtaining embryonic stem cells from private laboratories."
In fact, The
Washington Post reports that under guidelines issued by the
NIH last year, " ... the Clinton administration ... would have
allowed the first federal subsidies of human-embryo-cell research.
Those rules did not permit the use of federal funds to destroy human
embryos directly, but it would have allowed the government to sponsor
studies involving stem cells taken from embryos by privately financed
researchers. The policy said the embryos had to be slated for destruction
at fertility clinics, frozen and used in research with donors' consent."
So, under the
Clinton approach, private money would be used to kill the embryos,
and public money would then be available to fund experiments on
the extracted stem cells. As a logical matter, there is no difference.
If the federal government is subsidizing stem-cell research with
little regard to how those stem cells are harvested from embryos,
then the federal government is rewarding and even encouraging the
killing of embryos by private institutions.
The federal-funding
guidelines announced by President Bush last night permit embryonic
research on existing lines of stem cells, i.e., the embryos have
already been killed and the stem cells have already been extracted.
It is indisputable that Bush's guidelines are far more limited than
those left by Clinton. Ironically, however, Clinton's NIH guidelines
never went into effect. Therefore, the Bush administration will
be the first to use federal tax dollars to fund embryonic-stem-cell
research.
Clearly Clinton's
guidelines flew in the face of the 1995 federal law banning the
use of federal funds to conduct research in which embryos are destroyed.
Indeed, Clinton's purpose was to evade the law's restrictions. Conversely,
Bush can make a persuasive legal argument that by limiting research
to copies of stem-cell lines, i.e., stems cells that have been reproduced
from the original stem cells, he is complying with the 1995 ban.
But what has
not been addressed is why Bush did not simply reject the Clinton
guidelines outright and comply with the existing statutory prohibition.
In other words, the issue before Bush was a narrow one, i.e., should
Clinton's end-run around the law be upheld? If Bush had simply rejected
Clinton's guidelines, presumably whatever private funding currently
supports this research would have continued uninterrupted. Therefore,
I have to conclude that despite the denials of this administration,
Bush's decision was not based solely on moral or philosophical grounds,
but involved a political calculus as well.
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