Failing the Stem-Cell Test

By the Editors of National Review

For a decade now, the question of federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research has made for a heated political debate. Scientists believe the research may hold the promise of advancing medical research, but it also involves the destruction of living human embryos, and therefore raises the explosive question of the protection and regard we owe to human beings in their earliest stages.

Since 1995, Congress has prohibited taxpayer funds from paying for research in which embryos are destroyed. The Clinton administration, in its final months, explored the possibility of walking through a loophole in that law by funding everything that followed the destruction of embryos but not paying for the fatal act itself. They never actually went through with such funding. When George W. Bush came into office, he decided that such an approach, by providing a direct incentive for the destruction of embryos, violated the important ethical principle behind the spirit of the law. He proposed instead a narrower loophole of his own: The government would pay for research using lines of cells that already existed at the time of his decision, but not for those created after. That way, the potential of embryonic stem-cell science could be further explored, but federal money would not provide an incentive for the further destruction of embryos.

Bush’s policy was hotly debated throughout his time in office. Congress twice passed, and Bush twice vetoed, a measure that would have replaced it with the more permissive Clinton approach. On Monday, Pres. Barack Obama followed through on his campaign promise to rescind the Bush rules.

Unlike the bills Bush vetoed, however, Obama’s action did not replace the existing policy with another set of boundaries grounded in a different ethical calculus. Instead, Obama eliminated the Bush policy and then took the unusual and provocative step of also rescinding Bush’s 2007 executive order providing support for alternative sources of stem cells — an order that in no way limited embryonic stem-cell research and need not have been retracted. Having lifted these restrictions, Obama put no rules or boundaries of any kind in their place, instructing the scientists at the National Institutes of Health to do so on his behalf over the next few months. Obama’s executive order makes no mention of any moral qualm about the destruction of human embryos — whether left over from fertility treatments or created especially for experimentation, including human embryos created by cloning.

The last time NIH scientists were tasked with developing rules for embryo research, in 1994, they returned with proposals so permissive that Bill Clinton felt compelled to reject them. There is no reason to think the NIH will be any more circumspect this time, but President Obama unfortunately has given us considerable reason to think he will not reject even the broadest possible mandate for the exploitation of nascent human lives. With this week’s executive order, Obama has not so much staked out a position in the embryo debate as dismissed the debate itself as unnecessary.

The embryo debate is among the first real tests of our commitment to the equal protection of every human life in the age of biotechnology. The quandaries of this age will only grow more vexing and complicated. But scientific advances in recent years — especially the development of alternative sources of embryonic-like cells that do not necessitate the destruction of human organisms — appear to offer us a way around the test.

President Obama has turned his back on those advances. He has needlessly and clumsily forced a choice between the promise of progress and the respect for life, and has gone out of his way to ensure that we fail the moral test put before us. Let us hope this failure proves reversible in time and does not set the tone for science policy in the years to come.