Embryonic Stem Cell Reversal

President Obama recently reversed a policy instituted under Bush's administration that limited federal funding for medical research related to embryonic stem cells. Under Bush's policy, some research could take place, but none that would require embryos to be created in order to be destroyed and used for medical research.

So, from a strong pro-life perspective, President Bush's position was a moderate one. It did not fully respect the human dignity of all embryos, but it allowed only those that were to be destroyed anyway to be used for research. President Obama's policy goes much further, and this is truly sad and horrifying.

Not surprisingly, there has been quite a lot of commentary. Here are some excerpts, and you can follow the links to read the full articles.

Robert George and Eric Cohen in the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Obama made a big point in his speech of claiming to bring integrity back to science policy, and his desire to remove the previous administration's ideological agenda from scientific decision-making. This claim of taking science out of politics is false and misguided on two counts.

First, the Obama policy is itself blatantly political. It is red meat to his Bush-hating base, yet pays no more than lip service to recent scientific breakthroughs that make possible the production of cells that are biologically equivalent to embryonic stem cells without the need to create or kill human embryos. Inexplicably -- apart from political motivations -- Mr. Obama revoked not only the Bush restrictions on embryo destructive research funding, but also the 2007 executive order that encourages the National Institutes of Health to explore non-embryo-destructive sources of stem cells.

Second and more fundamentally, the claim about taking politics out of science is in the deepest sense antidemocratic. The question of whether to destroy human embryos for research purposes is not fundamentally a scientific question; it is a moral and civic question about the proper uses, ambitions and limits of science. It is a question about how we will treat members of the human family at the very dawn of life; about our willingness to seek alternative paths to medical progress that respect human dignity.

For those who believe in the highest ideals of deliberative democracy, and those who believe we mistreat the most vulnerable human lives at our own moral peril, Mr. Obama's claim of "taking politics out of science" should be lamented, not celebrated.

Yuval Levin on MoralAccountability.com dispels four myths about embryonic stem cell research, as follows:

1. Obama has restored federal policy to what it was prior to Bush’s 2001 stem cell policy announcement.
2. The Bush policy was a ban on embryonic stem cell research.
3. There are no viable scientific alternatives to the destruction of human embryos.
4. The promise of pluripotent stem cells is quite certain.

And, fascinatingly, some criticism from the Left, via William Saletan at Slate:

Think about what's being dismissed here as "politics" and "ideology." You don't have to equate embryos with full-grown human beings—I don't—to appreciate the danger of exploiting them. Embryos are the beginnings of people. They're not parts of people. They're the whole thing, in very early form. Harvesting them, whether for research or medicine, is different from harvesting other kinds of cells. It's the difference between using an object and using a subject. How long can we grow this subject before dismembering it to get useful cells? How far should we strip-mine humanity in order to save it?