The President’s Stem-Cell Dollars and the Judge’s Rebuke

[Geee]

National Review:

The President’s Stem-Cell Dollars and the Judge’s Rebuke
Advancing science does not justify the destruction of human life.

On August 23, Judge Royce Lamberth of the federal district court in Washington issued a preliminary injunction halting the implementation of new guidelines from the National Institutes of Health, which permitted the use of federal funds to support embryonic-stem-cell (ESC) research that entailed the ongoing destruction of human embryos. This, Judge Lamberth held, violated a restriction on funding embryo-destructive research known as the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, enacted in each year’s budget since 1996.

The Obama administration had claimed that the destruction of the embryos and the research using stem cells derived from them could be “separated,” so that the latter was publicly funded but the former (to honor the Dickey-Wicker Amendment) was not. In other words, the administration interpreted the law as saying: “Go ahead and kill the embryos using non-governmental funds; then you can use the stem-cell lines produced by killing the embryos for research using taxpayer money without restriction.” Of course, this interpretation would essentially nullify the amendment, treating its command as if it were a meaningless bookkeeping procedure. Judge Lamberth had no difficulty seeing through this shoddy reasoning: “To conduct ESC research, ESCs must be derived from an embryo. The process of deriving ESCs from an embryo results in the destruction of the embryo. Thus, ESC research necessarily depends upon the destruction of a human embryo.”
The administration ended up in court as a result of Pres. Barack Obama’s decision to reverse the course set by Pres. George W. Bush nine years ago. The Bush policy sought to advance cutting-edge research while maintaining the U.S. government’s longstanding neutrality regarding research that uses and destroys living human embryos. It neither funded nor proscribed such destruction, but did permit federal funds to support research on ESC lines already in existence as of the policy’s promulgation. Thus, it supplied no incentive with U.S. taxpayer dollars for any further destruction of human life for research purposes.

But the Obama administration decided this was not enough. In March 2009, the president issued an executive order reversing the direction taken by the previous administration, and offering the largesse of the federal treasury to scientists engaging in the use and destruction of living human beings. As implemented by the National Institutes of Health four months later — in guidelines Judge Lamberth has now enjoined while litigation proceeds — the Obama policy entrenches in federal law a deeply regrettable precedent: the principle that human beings at the earliest developmental stages may be instrumentalized and treated as raw materials to serve the desires of others. Yet at no point has the president or anyone in his administration offered any argument for treating human embryos as less than human beings or for intentionally destroying them for scientific research.