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A hypocritical stem cell veto
By Times editorial
Published July 20, 2006
No symbol is too sacrosanct for President Bush to manipulate for political gain. So Bush surrounded himself with children who began life as frozen embryos as he explained his first veto Wednesday, of a bill that would have expanded federal funding for stem cell research. The scene had the cynical fingerprints of Bush political adviser Karl Rove all over it. Equating the destruction of discarded embryos to the murder of a child, Bush said he was drawing "an important ethical line to guide our research." On closer examination, however, the line looks more hypocritical than ethical. First, the president's implication that stem cell research would destroy embryos that otherwise would become children is inaccurate. The frozen embryos available for federally funded research under the legislation would already have been rejected for implantation in a mother's womb, and slated for destruction instead. The donors would have to give their permission for the embryos to be used in medical research. Some 400,000 frozen embryos exist today, and few will become babies. Most don't survive the delicate process from in vitro fertilization, to implantation, to live birth. Fertility clinics collect far more embryos than they intend to use, knowing the excess will eventually be thrown away. The longer an embryo remains frozen, the less likely it will survive in the womb. Most Americans don't consider 5-day-old frozen embryos, called blastocysts and smaller than the period at the end of this sentence, human beings. Even staunch antiabortion lawmakers such as Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, reject Bush's argument. Bush referred to research using those embryos as the "taking of innocent human life." If he meant it, he would close down fertility clinics across the nation and arrest their owners, employees and patients. Yet he made no mention of the industry that produces discarded embryos. Not one child will be saved by Bush's veto. Medical research that could relieve the suffering of many Americans will be set back, however. Apparently in Bush's mind, actual lives are less valuable than theoretical ones.
[Last modified July 20, 2006, 05:42:33]
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