Embryo Stem Cell Research -- George W. Bush’s Compromise Was a Pro-Life Victory

Though our treatment of the unborn could still be improved.

Fifteen years ago last month, President George W. Bush announced his policy on federal funding for embryonic-stem-cell research, a policy that would shape the political conflict between the pro-life movement and the scientific community for the rest of his administration. (For an overview of the debates that ensued, interested readers will enjoy this comprehensive report issued in 2012 by the Witherspoon Council on Ethics and the Integrity of Science.)

Bush’s plan for stem-cell research was an elegant compromise — he would permit the federal government to fund research on stem-cell lines (that is, cultures of embryonic stem cells that can be grown indefinitely and shipped to researchers around the world) that had already been derived from human embryos (21 lines in total), but he would not fund research on new stem-cell lines. This policy would allow the government to support the burgeoning field of stem-cell research without creating an incentive for scientists to destroy human embryos. An appropriations rider known as the Dickey-Wicker amendment has prohibited the federal government from funding research in which human embryos are created or destroyed, so government cannot fund the creation of embryonic stem cells, though research using those stem cells has been considered acceptable.

Though a compromise, it was highly controversial, especially among scientists and their supporters who felt that it would hold back promising medical research; many people even spoke of the moderate funding policy as a “ban” on stem-cell research. Congress twice attempted to overturn the policy through legislation, which President Bush vetoed, and by the 2008 elections, candidates from both parties promised to overturn the policy. Today, the Obama administration funds research on 369 embryonic-stem-cell lines, and new stem-cell lines are always being added to the list of those eligible for federal funding.

Despite the overturning of Bush’s policy, he has been vindicated to some extent by developments in stem-cell research. In 2006, a promising alternative to embryonic stem cells (so-called induced pluripotent stem cells, which are derived from adult skin cells and do not require the destruction of embryos) was developed, in part owing to vigorous support from the Bush administration.

Thanks to the development of this alternative source of stem cells, the most disturbing prospects of embryonic-stem-cell research are much less likely to come to pass. Cloning and killing human embryos on an industrial scale to create personalized stem-cell lines for millions of Americans — a ghoulish prospect fêted by Ron Reagan at the 2004 Democratic presidential convention — is much less likely because of the alternatives that have been developed as a result, in part, of the Bush stem-cell policy.

However, while the future is not as bleak as it might have been, the underlying moral problems raised by research on human embryonic stem cells remain unresolved. Although human cloning, for instance, became less vigorously pursued after the discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells in 2006, American scientists in 2013 created embryonic stem cells by destroying human embryos for the first time; their feat was replicated by other American scientists in 2014. Cloning to create stem cells (which is to say, creating cloned human embryos for the express purpose of destroying them) remains legal in much of the United States and, in California and New York, is even supported by state-funded agencies.

#share#Most of the stem-cell controversy in the first decade of this century concerned the source of stem cells, but advances in stem-cell research now mean that troubling uses of stem cells, regardless of whether they are derived from embryos or not, are now being proposed by scientists. Adding human stem cells to animal embryos to generate chimeras (lab animals that contain human cells, tissues, and organs) is an emerging area of research that the National Institutes of Health is now considering supporting. Scientists are also working on ways to manufacture human sex cells (sperm and egg cells) from stem cells, which could dramatically transform the nature of human reproduction.

There are likewise a number of areas of embryo research that will continue to result in the destruction of large numbers of human embryos. Though there is little data available on the kinds of embryo research being conducted in the United States, in the United Kingdom only about one in four embryo-destroying research projects involve the creation of stem cells.

Recent developments in gene-editing technology may soon allow doctors to modify human embryos to prevent genetic disease. This raises the much-feared specter of “designer babies,” though in fact, for the foreseeable future, the genetic modification of human embryos is likely to be confined to research — meaning that scientists will genetically modify human embryos, but to prevent the birth of any “designer babies” they will scrupulously destroy any of the human embryos they experiment on.

Dealing with the underlying moral problems raised by human-embryo research means reforming the way IVF is practiced.

Perhaps more important than any form of embryo research, however, are the practices of the in vitro fertilization industry itself. Most human-embryo research uses embryos that are “left over” from IVF clinics. IVF doctors will create many more embryos than they transfer to the woman’s uterus, freezing the rest for future attempts. If a pregnancy is established before all the embryos are transferred, the parents are faced with the decision of what to do with the remaining embryos. Some are donated to other couples trying to have a child, some are donated to researchers, many are discarded, and others are simply kept frozen as parents struggle with the decision.

The availability of these frozen human beings is what makes most embryo research possible. (More rarely, scientists create embryos expressly for research, as they do when they attempt to create cloned human embryos.) Though the stem-cell debate was often posed as a conflict between the demands of science and the demands of ethics, scientists could argue that they were only asking to be held to the same ethical standards as are IVF doctors, who regularly kill human embryos with little justification. Dealing with the underlying moral problems raised by human-embryo research means reforming the way IVF is practiced — reducing the number of excess embryos that are created so that thousands of human embryos will not be left in freezers to be either discarded or experimented on by scientists. Such reforms will not be easy, but it is a political project that deserves more attention from the pro-life community.

Though there are still many ways in which the treatment of the unborn in the United States can be improved, we can at least be thankful that, because of wise decisions like Bush’s stem-cell policy, the situation of the unborn is not deteriorating as quickly as it might otherwise have.