Stephen, I don’t really think the new platform language is any more or any less in line with Bush’s policy. Bush does not provide funding for embryo research itself—that’s prohibited by statute anyway. There’s been language in the federal budget every year since 1995 prohibiting taxpayer dollars from funding research in which embryos are harmed, destroyed, or exposed to serious risk. The Bush policy provides funding for research that uses lines of embryonic stem cells that were derived through the (privately-funded) destruction of embryos prior to the policy’s enactment. That way federal dollars fund some work on cells derived from embryos that had already been destroyed before there was ever any federal funding to influence the life-or-death decision but do not encourage the ongoing or future destruction of embryos with a taxpayer funded incentive. It’s a compromise that tries to see if embryonic stem cell science might be advanced, without supporting any further embryo destruction, to the point where embryo destruction might be rendered unnecessary—as now appears to be happening. The Bush policy was not supportive of “experimentation on human embryos for research purposes,” though it did seek to see if some good might be drawn out of the consequences of a past (and therefore no longer preventable) unethical practice without encouraging future unethical practices.

Of course, embryo research on new embryos has continued in the private sector (and has contributed to the latest advances too), the Bush policy is only about federal funding. The place where the new platform language stakes out new ground is on precisely that question of privately funded research, which it now more explicitly opposes than it did before. But that doesn’t really bear directly on the Bush policy, since President Bush couldn’t do anything about privately funded research by himself.

As I see it, the platform language expresses the view that human embryos should not be treated as raw material for research. That’s a pretty straightforward pro-life view, though it’s one with no chance of being enacted into law anytime soon. I think the language could have used more clarity about the term “experimentation” to address Bopp’s point, but in practice that point wouldn’t have changed much.